Comment by averagewall
8 years ago
This issue is too political for normal people to properly understand. I don't mean to offend you personally but there's little value in the feelings of someone who's been immersed in a social atmosphere of global warming propaganda, calls to action, and pressure to shut down dissenting voices. Even scientists can't safely publish work on positive effects of climate change or areas where it's not as bad as previously thought without littering their papers with defenses of "but it's still bad".
Your GP said "we must" do some things. No, there isn't a single obvious best answer. We don't know what the longer term effects will be and whether building protection will be enough or not - or enough to pay for their useful life. We don't have accurate science for that. Even if we did, we've still got hundreds of years to prepare, and importantly, future money to spend on it, which is cheaper than spending money today because of the time value of money. Every solution costs money and it's no obvious which one is cheaper.
Where did you get the mass extinction and "entirely destroy life on the planet" ideas? I know there are frequent extinctions of insects and large mammals, but that's been going on for centuries and is nothing to do with global warming. Global warming might exacerbate that but again, I don't think we have clear predictions of whole food chain collapses.
EDIT: I see you've toned down your comment from a strong belief to a suggestion of a possibility, so the main motivation of my reply doesn't really apply now.
This reads very much like a Bjorn Lomborg type argument - along the lines of: global warming is not proven, and anyway if it does happen it may not be all bad, and even if it is bad we could better spend the money elsewhere. Personally when it comes to disturbing planetary equilibrium I'd rather err on the side of caution.
Even if 'erring on the side of caution' means killing millions of people by diverting resources that could've been used to cure diseases, solve local pollution problems, stop crime and democide, improve work safety, etc etc?
We're not talking about packing an extra sandwich for a picnic here. These things cost.
You assert forcefully, but I think there are problems with what you say: firstly there is no guarantee that we would spend the money saved on global warming on those other things that you list; secondly it's false to assert that we have to choose between those things and fixing global warming; thirdly efforts to fix global warming could have benefits of their own including in some of the areas that you list, i.e. malaria is likely to increase due to rises in temperature, efficiency measures and reductions in consumption could help cure pollution problems.
Since we're talking about anthropocentric climate change, it's safe to assume "life" means "life as we know it". But you already knew that.
The distinction seems important to me. One has a clear definition and the other could be imagined to mean anything the reader wants. That's alright if everyone already understands and agrees with you, but it makes disagreement useless. Since climate change is so political, there are lot of exaggerations flying around, so you have to be careful.
I think I know that when you said "anthropocentric", you really meant "anthropogenic" but I really had to think hard to see if you were using a clever word to make a point about our own perception of human life. Eventually I decided it was just a spelling mistake but it took effort and I'm still not sure. So trying to be accurate is helpful if you're going for understanding rather than just expressing a feeling.
The Permian extinction was a global warming extinction. The atmosphere was methane and hydrogen sulfide. Oxygen levels dropped too low for anything to survive... read the book 'Under Green Skies' which makes the case for that.
There are reasonable people predicting that type of mass extinction will occur within our lifetime. This blog makes a pretty good argument it will happen: http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/extinction.html?m=1
Last global extinction event was 11,000 years ago when temperature rose drastically, ice sheets melted and sea levels rose by 120m. It killed most of megafauna. What caused that (and what caused the ice age in the first place) is still not well understood by scientists.
In my opinion, to think that human caused global warming and sea levels rising by 1.5mm per year will lead to global extinction event seems a bit far fetched when you compare it to what caused the last global extinction. The current climate changes are minuscule compared to huge climate changes (not caused by any human activity!) that happened quite recently.
That megafauna didn't live in e.g. megacities (containing vital infrastructure and toxic chemical factories) built on coastal flood plains. They also didn't have a (fairly) monocultured web of food items that could be devastated by climate change. Or a bee infrastructure that was already struggling and could be tipped over into extinction which then leads to much bigger problems.
Sure, we're going to have a smaller change in climate but we're also a lot more precariously placed than they were (and about as incapable of dealing with it.)
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There are reasonable people...
Have they got Paul Erlich on board?
The less clear our predictions are, the more we should manage the risk.
If we've shifted planetary equilibrium far enough, we could be just "2 or 3 volcanic eruptions within a short window of time" away from accelerated feedback effects into a runaway catastrophe
If we manage to e.g. change ocean conditions enough (and the changes are already dramatic) to take out a significant proportion of the plankton in the world, it’s not going to go well for us.
What of the things that we "must" do do you actually disagree with?