Every point you just mentioned has been dealt to death. And if you really want to be serious about "two orders of magnitude of difficulty", please try to quantify it, and explain why, for example, building more solar and nuclear plants just isn't going to cut it.
I still don't really see what's wrong with the statement that I made. Would you argue that we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, solar cycles? Or CO2 sequestration? I am willing to admit that it's possible that we do, but it's a much harder argument to make.
Finally, you are making my original point for me. People seem stuck in the theory and don't pay attention to the practical matters. For example, on the issue of nuclear power, Japan and Germany are in the process of decommissioning their nuclear power plants. The forecast for nuclear power is flat at best and negative at worst.
I'm all for building 10,000 nuclear power plants tomorrow, but it's not politically feasible. If that's your solution, then you're just not being serious.
With respect to the two orders of magnitude of difficulty, a quick Google came up with the following title "Fighting Climate Change Could Cost 4% of Global Economy — but It’s Worth It". The article is by someone supportive of CO2 reduction policies, so it seems fair to take the number as a first approximation. 4% of the global economy is A LOT.
Again, with a quick Google search, I came up with the following document (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.201... addresses exactly this issue. A quote:
"In response to these predictions a large number of developed countries signed the Kyoto protocol in 1997. The Protocol is aimed at mitigating global warming, primarily by reducing net emissions of the main ‘greenhouse gases’: carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrous oxide (NO) methane (CH4) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)). A variety of proposals have been put forward aimed at achieving the reductions in emissions proposed under the Protocol. Some of these proposals, most notably reductions in CFC emissions, involve relatively low costs and have additional benefits, such as reduced damage to the atmospheric ozone layer, sufficient to justify them even in the absence of concerns about global warming. Others, such as reductions in emissions sufficient to stabilize the current atmospheric stocks of CO2, would involve substantial economic and social costs."
I'm sorry, but even when I try to read your posts sympathetically, all I see is "The science is settled, and you're an idiot" (I especially appreciate you addressing me as "dude"), when I've just pointed out above that at least some of the points you are making are not in fact settled, or even realistic.
> I still don't really see what's wrong with the statement that I made. Would you argue that we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, solar cycles? Or CO2 sequestration?
Do we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, hurricanes? No. But when the weather service warns a category-5 hurricane is approaching your town and expected to make a landfall tomorrow afternoon, you don't just ignore that (after all, they don't know everything, and the prediction can (and sometimes does) go wrong) and go on a picnic.
Do we know everything about general relativity? No, but that doesn't stop us from trusting airline pilots who are in turn relying on GPS signal which actually works only because the satellites are compensating for general relativistic effects.
Do we know everything about solar cycles? No, but we have Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), and numerous other satellites whose entire purpose is to observe the sun. If the sun is emitting more solar radiation than before, we'd know.
Let me just quote wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation#Solar_variation...
> The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) concluded that the measured magnitude of recent solar variation is much smaller than the amplification effect due to greenhouse gases but acknowledges in the same report that there is a low level of scientific understanding with respect to solar variation.
In other words, even if we don't know a lot about solar variation, we know enough to rule out the possibility that its effect is large enough to drive global warming. Unless we could somehow hypothesize a new mechanism completely overlooked by scientists so far and somehow that mechanism explains current global temperature trend and we find that the global warming effect was due to the sun instead of CO2 (which would mean that all the current climate models, which agree with measured CO2 and temperature, are actually spectacularly wrong).
Occam's razor says it's CO2.
I'm sorry, the science IS settled. I won't call you an idiot, you might be just misinformed and (due to the misinformation) cannot discern peer-reviewed science from FUDs.
* About economics, I'll just say "building 10,000 nuclear plants" is not the only way (actually, probably not even the cheapest way) to reduce CO2 emission.
And if you're looking at economics, you can't ignore the potential cost of the global warming being real (more likely than not) and we do nothing or very little to stop it (sadly, also likely). During the WW2, USA poured enormous resource into development of nuclear weapon, even when nobody was sure if it's going to work at all, because the cost of doing nothing (and finding it out when Nazis developed one first) was considered unacceptable.
Every time I go to investigate specific issues, it appears that there are credible people that disagree with the "settled science".
Let me be clear, I'm not arguing the actual point, I'm just trying to explain to you how hard it is for somebody who really does want to know the truth to actually find it. For every person that says one thing, I find another one that makes an equally compelling argument that it is the opposite. I just don't know who to believe.
Take the "global warming pause" problem. I did a Google search and started reading some of the results, and on the first page I came across this apparently well respected scientist who doesn't agree with the consensus. What criteria am I to use to disregard his opinion in favor of someone else's who appears to me to be equally qualified?
Here's the relevant parts:
The claim that the pause has been caused by heat is going into the deep ocean below 700 m is speculative and relies on models undergoing many data adjustments. That speculation is contradicted by two major issues.
First the Argo data has definitively shown the upper 300 meters have cooled slightly since 2003 (Read Xue 2011) and the consensus among oceanographers is that it is in the upper 100 meters that most of the heat is exchanged with the atmosphere.
Second is it defies known physics. IPCC expert Dr. Hans von Storch said in a recent interview "there is evidence that the oceans have absorbed more heat than we initially calculated. Temperatures at depths greater than 700 meters (2,300 feet) appear to have increased more than ever before. The only unfortunate thing is that our simulations failed to predict this effect." He went on to lament “If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”
“There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.”
The Dr. von Storch interview can be seen in its entirety at Stampf, O. and Traufetter , G. (2013) Spiegel International, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von...