Right now, there's an oil glut and a natural gas glut. The US may be self-sufficient in energy in about four years without even trying. The fear that fossil fuels will run out in the near term is gone. This has taken the pressure off the need for alternative energy.
Industrial farming at scale is much newer than that. This is like claiming that GHG is from "many thousands of years ago" because people made wood fires back then.
> It has changed the entire planet, but the difference with our more recent GHG experiment is one of scale.
Yes, and if you asked me for a guess I'd say the scale of the farming "experiment" is much greater. I'm interested to hear reasons you believe the opposite is true, not just an assertion.
> We massively underestimate the effect that all these GHG will have.
We do? Are you saying that you understand the true future effect of one change to a very complex non-linear system?
> On top of this we are only about 10% of the way into the GHG experiment
Similar to the last point, but this should be followed by "according to [Researchers'] model" and not left as a plain assertion.
> the world will not be a pretty place once we get to 1200 ppm CO2.
Please name the model or whatever logical progression you are using to arrive at this idea, too.
Actually most agricultural land clearing did happen many hundred to thousands of years ago. People have proposed that all the carbon released by this activity did have an impact on the planet and this prevented us from re-entering another ice age. I am not too sure how much evidence supports this hypothesis as the amount of carbon released was relatively low until we started burning fossil fuels in the last century.
Yes, and if you asked me for a guess I'd say the scale of the farming "experiment" is much greater. I'm interested to hear reasons you believe the opposite is true, not just an assertion.
The effect of farming has probably had more impact to date on the planet, but it is not as large as what the GHG experiment will have on the planet if we do nothing.
We do? Are you saying that you understand the true future effect of one change to a very complex non-linear system?
Actually the effect of adding GHG is very easy to predict - it increases the amount of energy trapped in a concentration dependent effect. What is hard to model is what the precise effect will be and when it will happen. A nice analogy to use is what will happen if you drive your car at 100 mph into a brick wall without wearing a seat belt or having an airbag. You can’t predict in advance what will happen to you, but none of the likely outcomes will be good.
Similar to the last point, but this should be followed by "according to [Researchers'] model" and not left as a plain assertion.
Under the "do-nothing” model (effectively our current model) we just keep burning all the fossil fuels until they are all gone. We do have a pretty good idea of how much fossil fuels we can extract and so it is easy to calculate how much CO2 will be released if we burn them all. Unfortunately all the changes to the model over the last few years is much of the fossil fuels we thought were uneconomic to extract (and so were not counted as being releasable) have proven extractable (i.e. fracking and shale oil).
Please name the model or whatever logical progression you are using to arrive at this idea, too
My model is our current “do-nothing” model where all the fossil fuels that can be burnt will be burnt. The end outcome of this is a CO2 concentration north of 1200ppm. While we can’t predict exactly what will happen if we reach this level we do have a pretty good idea from the past that it won’t be nice.
Actually one of the big worries is that some of the large carbon sinks like the arctic tundra will start warming up enough to result in a non-linear runaway release of GHG. We don’t know if this will happen, but I am none to keen to find out.