Why Half a Degree of Global Warming Is a Big Deal
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If that's a thing, then I think your comment is also a thing.
The way to solve global warming is to support market forces pushing for efficiency, not government force that supports inefficiency.
It'd be better to take all associated costs with implementing and verifying such a scheme, and give them out as grants to entrepreneurs creating electric vehicles, clean energy, greenhouse-neutral farming, etc.
If you halved the price of the iPhone by introducing slave labor in some faraway land, you would still sell a boatload of iPhones.
This is one of the ways that I believe government should intervene because individuals are very bad at deciding based on long-term impacts.
How did the USA lower emissions the most in 2017 while also withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord? Because efficiency is increasing across the board and people are buying more efficient devices.
If you produced lab-grown meat that was undistinguishable and utilized energy more efficiently, then it would be less expensive and people would buy it.
There are numerous examples of people paying more for things in the long term because they're less expensive immediately. Entire industries are built on this. Again, humans aren't particularly good at forecasting long-term decisions.
Additionally, The VAST majority of emission decrease in the past 10 years in the US has been due to moving from coal to shale gas, not because of individual purchasing decisions. It's iterative movement that was caused by a combination of market forces and government regulations, not one or the other on its own (and the current administration is actually reversing many regulations that promoted shale gas over coal).
Renewables still don't even touch the impacts of moving from coal to shale gas.
Taking one example of a specific accord and saying, "because we didn't need this government [thing], we don't need any government [thing]," is a faulty generalization. Truth is, we need the government and the markets and several other things that work together in an extremely complex way (that no single human can understand fully) to solve global climate change.
Government subsidies are typically meant to prop up industries against market forces.
"Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."
— Paul Ehrlich
"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
— Kenneth Watt
The fact is, we've had 70+ temperature swings in the last 4,500 years, including 2 since 1970. It's odd we talk about catastrophic things happening when the earth warms, but what about the dire consequences when it starts to cool again?
A Swelling Volume Of Scientific Papers Now Forecasting Global Cooling In The Coming Decades:
http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-scie...
It seems to me that the dire consequences are about the ability of nations to deal with relatively sudden changes. We are no longer at the point where populations can shift easily on a grand scale. Four thousand years ago it was much easier for humanity to shift production of food and seek out new places to live. Today not so much. This is especially so since almost no one knows how to live off the land anymore and the even if we did know this it isn't possible due to the massive decline in animal populations and habitat.
Four thousand years ago, just a two year drought and 1/3 of your village would die of starvation. Few people could move anywhere. Pastoral peoples moved around but during times of scare resources, like a drought, multiple groups moving to the last remaining pasture would result in a battle with mass killing.
It's easier for an individual to move now than in the past. This is clear. But if an entire high population region becomes uninhabitable in a short period of time then it's difficult for that population to shift. The neighboring countries generally won't want to accept the incoming people and often times can't sustain the incoming population.
Look at the problems with a few million people suddenly going to Europe has caused. Imagine if it were 150 million people trying to get into Europe.
If a region becomes unproductive, the kids will move. The parents will stay. And populations will shift as they always have.
I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference. Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.
What good_gnu did was point out the logical fallacy commonly used by climate change deniers: "something is false simply because a proof or argument that someone has offered for it is invalid" (a full description http://www.csun.edu/%7Edgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum%20...).
The number of warming and cooling studies over time would suggest to me (and this is my interpretation) that climate was a (relatively) new field back in 1970ish, people were still working out what was going on, how to study it, and what the data meant, and over time as these things have become clearer the trend towards warming has become the most arrived at interpretation.
Though I'm sure there have been exaggerated claims in the past, nothing that good_gnu said leads to "what you are saying is that in hindsight it's easier to see which side was making exaggerated claims?" being an accurate summary.
a. Not a climate denier
b. I never said anything like you are referring to. I never inferred that since its cooling, climate change shouldn't be believed.
c. What I AM saying is the earth's temperature has swung in both directions in a fairly cyclical manner for thousands of years before heavy industry. The earth's temperature warmed when there weren't ANY humans on the planet.
Even going back some 1.2 milion years, scientists still are not sure what caused the change:
"The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time interval in the more recent climate history of our planet," says Fischer. Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years. Before the transition, the period of variation was about 41 thousand years while afterwards it became 100 thousand years. "The reason for this change is not known."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.h...
I would also add the Clean Air Act has done a ton to improve the US and the amount of pollution they contribute.
https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning...
We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries? What are they doing to help reduce pollution and greehouse gases? If we're doing all we can, and other countries aren't following suit, then our gains become minimal and the march towards this catastrophe will continue, unabated.
> Any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming. - [Ineson, S.et al. Regional climate impacts of a possible future grand solar minimum - https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535]
> We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries?
It's a difficuly question, lead by example? Change anyway, because the more time we have to develop countermeasures the smaller the magnitude of the problem will peak at? I don't know, but waiting for all countries to fall into line isn't going to work.
Who is doing this pre-conditioning?
> into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what.
So, either climate change exists, and this will cause refugees (as will anything that causes a place to become unsupporting of human life, war, famine etc. etc.)
Or, climate change doesn't exist, or does but is exaggerated, and the "climate refugees" are going to be forced on us by some unmentioned power with climate change being used as the excuse.
If do belive in climate change but don't particularly like immigrants then your only real option is to prevent climate change. People will leave their homes when the place they live becomes unlivable (for instance, in the case of Bangladesh, underwater). This is a hard fact, it's not something unique to these people, it's what everyone would do. Only the insane would stay behind railing against the encroaching ocean.
If you don't believe in climate change (despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists) then you're left with some sort of conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you and climate change is being used as an excuse. This is fantasy, and there's not much that can be done to help you in this situation because what you're taking part in at this point is a religious belief (the evidence points to X but you're going to believe Y).
So, same question: what about the people that realize that mass immigration will destroy the labour markets that are their livelihoods ?
> conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you
As pointed out above, any of the many "precariously employed" people in the west are under the very real threat of their jobs getting destroyed by mass immigration. Add to that people dependent on the social support systems in their respective countries.
Also it is pretty obvious that any job that will at some point come under threat from AI already is under threat from mass immigration. That's ~80% of all jobs according to some studies.
We need to find ways to fix the situation everywhere in the world, preventing immigration in the first place, if we want to have decent labour conditions. "Preventing climate change" is not that. Closing borders, while unpopular, is a solution, in that it incentivizes the problematic countries' populations to fix their governments.
I don't see where you've said that, so you might want to cite something here.
> so no action there will be effective.
Again, I can't see where you've said this.
> That's ... bullshit, according to these reports. I don't know how you can even suggest such a thing.
Wait, I don't understand. Are you saying that it's "there is no way to stop catastrophic climate change" and then immediately contradicting yourself by saying "it's bullshit" that "there is no way to stop catastrophic climate change", because that certainly seems like what you're saying. It's possible that I've misunderstood what you've said, so you might want to clarify as your opening to this comment is incredibly confusing.
Regardless, we can take a look at these reports and see what we can see!
<snip> So apprently this bit was too long for a HN comment, so I gisted it: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/wjessop/e7fdb82ca0832fe5b... </snip>
So what does this all tell us? It seems that most scientists investigating climate change are finding a link between human activity and the sorts of temperature increases we're hearing about, 2+°C.
Even if you think that the chances are slim that we can correct this, it seems like it's worth a go. It's better to slam into the wall at 30 miles per hour than to just give up because crashing into the wall is inevitable and so crash into the wall at 40, at least in my view.
So, I'm going to skip over the other stuff you mentioned, because this has gone on far too long now:
> So, same question: what about the people that realize that mass immigration will destroy the labour markets that are their livelihoods ?
They're not going to be happy about it? If climate change displace people then they will move. You can tell them they can't all you like, and you can complain until you are blue in the face, but if their country is underater, or it is impossible to grow food or find water they will leave.
> As pointed out above, any of the many "precariously employed" people in the west are under the very real threat of their jobs getting destroyed by mass immigration. Add to that people dependent on the social support systems in their respective countries.
Once more, if areas of the world become inhabitable people will turn up, you might not like it, but it's going to happen.
> Also it is pretty obvious that any job that will at some point come under threat from AI already is under threat from mass immigration. That's ~80% of all jobs according to some studies.
Not sure how that's relevant to climate change.
> We need to find ways to fix the situation everywhere in the world
Yes, climate change seems (at least given the wealth of evidence that it exists, and is of the scale widely suggested) to be that problem.
> preventing immigration in the first place if we want to have decent labour conditions.
That's just your opinion really.
> "Preventing climate change" is not that.
I disagree.
> Closing borders, while unpopular, is a solution, in that it incentivizes the problematic countries' populations to fix their governments.
Well, not really. Governments don't have their own climate. If the US/China etc. piss away the climate and it affects the rest of the world, then there's not much "their governments" can do about it.
Also, like I said before, if your country is basically underwater, or now too hot to grow food or find water, people are going to leave and go somewhere else. Refugee camps are going to get further and further away from the encrouching inhospitable areas and closer and closer to you wether you like it or not. You can "close the borders" but that is only going to work up to a point, and if you don't actually attempt to fix the problem then fixing the symptom of the problem isn't going to help forever.
I assure you we can have closed or open borders and it won't influence global warming. And global warming will only have a very minimal impact on migration flows.
Please point out where I misunderstood you.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/sur...
That scientists predict and mispredict is nothing new, but the overwhelming evidence now is that climate change is here, and it's damaging.
If almost all climate change scientists are in fact wrong, but we decide that's a (slim) risk we can't afford to take and we do something about it then the worst that can happen is we perhaps slow down the economy of the world (which given that the economy, at least to my reading, is a self-referential pyramid scheme, doesn't really matter that much). There's even the possibility later if we discover that climate change is just a natural fluctuation that we don't have any impact on of just reverting to our old behaviour.
If we decide that climate scientists are wrong, and do nothing about it, but it turns out they were right, then the worst that can happen is that there is a huge amount of suffering, strife, and ultimately death.
Also, as far as I can tell from some limited research, "no tricks zone" seems to be pretty biased, and fairly easily debunked.
My understanding is that Ehrlich's prediction had little or nothing to do with climate change. He was making his statements based primarily on population growth.
> Kenneth Watt
I can't find any evidence, outside of highly-biased sites, that this was anything more than an isolated case of one ecologist postulating on the possible forms of climate change.