A small point:
If we had started reducing emissions back in 2000, we’d only have to reduce them by 2% per year to limit warming to 2C by 2100. Today we’d have to reduce them by 5% per year. If we wait another decade, we’d have to reduce them by a massive 9% per year. pic.twitter.com/p2bIs7kMJB
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) February 23, 2019
The Supreme Court stole the US election of 2000 AD for the Republicans. For George Bush, Jr. It stole it from Albert Gore.
My friend Stirling Newberry was the only person at the Supreme Court protesting.
Afterwards, he said to me and some others (paraphrased): “That was our last chance. We are going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.”
Turns out he was right.
(Whatever you may think of Gore, and I think he’s a coward, he was, ummmm, serious about climate change.)
We aren’t going to hold global warming at two degrees Celcius. We aren’t even going to come close.
We all know this. More on some specific consequences, in only one country, which will cost hundreds of millions of lives, later.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Herman
I have to admit that I used to make fun of Al Gore just like so many other people did at the time. Remember that South Park episode where they made fun of Gore? I heard that the South Park guys apologized for that episode since it turns out Gore was right about climate change.
In my opinion Gore is somewhat similar to Jimmy Carter. You could argue that both were neoliberals (some argue that the neoliberal turn in America started under Carter and not Ronald Reagan) but they were right about the environment which is probably the most important issue facing humanity today.
Unfortunately, Americans don’t want to listen to people like Carter and Gore. At most we want to have our cake and eat it too, meaning we say we want to fight climate change and protect the environment but nobody wants to give up their materialistic, high-consumption lifestyle. That is one of the reasons why I am skeptical of programs like the Green New Deal that do not ask Americans to make any sacrifices to save the environment. It is similar to our modern approach to war. Since we no longer have a draft our wars can go on indefinitely since most Americans are not asked to sacrifice anything, not even higher taxes.
Daniel A Lynch
If we could hold 2C warming, or 1.5C, or whatever, it would still be terrible. We are already in a mass extinction. Woodland caribou have gone officially extinct in the lower 48 due to loss of habitat. Moose are dying in the lower 48 due to a plague of ticks made possible by mild winters. Polar bears dying, glaciers disappearing, Arctic ice is going away, Antarctica and Greenland’s ice may slide into the ocean, etc., etc.. If these things are already happening now, what the heck do you thing it’s going to be like at +2C?
Whoever came up with the 1.5C or 2C targets should be shot, because it’s irresponsible to tell people that everything will be peachy if only we limit warming to so many degrees. No polar bear ever agreed to the 2C target. Warming is not OK now, and it won’t be OK at +2C. We need to be REVERSING warming, not merely “mitigating” it.
Our last hope is geoengineering. If I were king, I would order NASA to drop everything and refocus on geoengineering. Geoengineering might not work, or it might result in toxic side effects, but it’s to the point that there is no alternative.
Bill Hicks
Sorry, but I don’t believe Gore would have done anything about global warming as president since it would have killed his reelection chances. “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” Cheney said, and the vast majority of stupid Americans agree, which is why the last two Dumbocratic administrations squandered 16 vitally important years between them.
nihil obstet
I don’t think Gore would have blown off the warnings about a terrorist attack in the U.S. After all, he was part of the administration when the previous effort was made on the World Trade Center (2/23/93). It’s probable that his administration would have prevented 9/11 and its subsequent explosion of wars and of the national surveillance state.
My judgmental problem with Gore is NAFTA. He was its salesman on Clinton’s behalf. He argued that NAFTA’s privileging of capital was a first step, that environmental and labor protections would follow rather quickly (not that anybody believed him, but he argued it earnestly). Among its other devastating effects, NAFTA has been an environmental disaster, and I haven’t heard a peep out of Gore about the need to add the promised environmental protections nor to insure that future trade agreements include them. Instead, he did his Inconvenient Truth talks and movie about individuals’ actions, completely ignoring how government policies he promoted enabled global warming.
StewartM
+1 for nihil obstet
Yes, someone needs to answer how shipping stuff all over the world to make then sell is ‘green’ or sustainable in any sense of the word. That’s even more true when you consider not the oil burned in moving stuff all over the planet, but add to that the deliberate intent to avoid laws to protect the environment.
There is possibly one bit of good news, and that is that the world population bust may hit us sooner than anticipated, perhaps in just three decades:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-might-actually-run-out-of-people/
Though that, if true, may be more disaster mitigation than prevention.
Ten Bears
We passed the tipping point at 400ppm, it’s a brave new world, one where not necessarily the strong will survive. Or the well-provisioned. Think afarensis. Think … omnivores.
I often despair of humanity, seeing the mass as that of maggots: a few will evolve and escape as flies, the vast majority will consume the host and die, we as a species, the human species, as a “race”, the human race, today stand at a cusp, an iteration, in the evolution, in the maturing, of humankind. But if we don’t abandon – outgrow – this irrational dependency on adolescent fairytales and attendant adolescent squabbles over whose imaginary dog has the bigger dick… we may very well not survive at all.
It may not be thousands upon thousands of cavernous spacecraft, vast slaughter-houses piloted by ravenous vaguely reptilian creatures, replete with horns and folked tail, intent not as benevolent overseers of the demise of this world and our current iteration in human evolution and our children’s evolution onto the next iteration of humanity but as ravenous reptilian creatures… hungry lizards whom we’ve invited here to eat, but our children and grandchildren are the next iteration in the evolution of the human species. They may not make it.
Re. Gore, I remember, all too well. All he had to do was stand up and say “Hey!, wait a minute!”
Willy
The hard part might be keeping folks from learning that soylent green is people.
But.. come to think of it, if there’s money in it they’ll fucking hoax it. FUD works. So forget that part. A lot of people wont care. Or they’ll consider it part of God’s plan as long as there’s ketchup.
The trick is to make greening cool, and the deniers uncool.
different clue
Eco-bio-physically, we still “could” re-balance the sky-carbon and de-warm the global. Politically, we can’t.
The global overclass sees global warming as one of the methods to be used for killing 7-or-so billion people over the next hundred years and making it look like an accident to those same people. The overclasses are invested in deliberately warming the global in order to exterminate most of us. They will never proclaim that openly for proclaiming it openly would warn the targets prematurely. It is a social class war of democidal extermination being waged in only one downward direction.
The targeted classes would first have to realize they are targeted, and what they are targeted for, before they could think about how to rise up somehow, and round up and exterminate the Overclass all over the earth. Until the Overclass is exterminated from existence, global de-warming will not be permitted or possible. If that can’t happen fast enough to matter, or even happen at all; then those few of us or our descendants who survive will have to survive the Big Heat Rising as best we can.
Hopefully there will be some lower-class-majority “left-behinds” armed, trained, ready and crouching in wait to exterminate every Overclass person when the Overclasses emerge from their gated bunkers to Inherit The Earth as they dream of.
If this comment is banworthy, I will accept my banning.
If instead, I am to be given a lecture on morals and ethics; I would raise the morals and ethics of permitting a terminal-if-allowed-to-exist cancer . . . to exist and go terminal when the patient could have been saved by exterminating the social Overclass cancer in time.
Of course I am too weak and sqeamish to kill anyone myself. So I could certainly be accused of hypocrisy.
different clue
Here is an article which illustrates my point.
https://gizmodo.com/how-google-microsoft-and-big-tech-are-automating-the-1832790799
scruff
I was in full agreement with that comment until I got to this sentence. It was human “management” of the environment that created this problem in the first place, and even if some sort of miracle happens that allows geoengineering to not make everything worse, the overall outcome would be to reward the brain circuitry which says “See? We can do whatever we want to the universe and never suffer consequences!”
I don’t think there is any such thing as a last hope that relies of human intervention. Our only “last hope” is in the collapse of civilization, and in the possibility that some natural interaction has the potential to mitigate the mess technotopianism has caused.
bruce wilder
The geoenginneering approach reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what is killing the planet. When “the” problem was Freon destroying the ozone, it was a narrow problem susceptible to a targeted solution. A lot of people still fumble about trying to think about global warming due to fossil fuel use as a somewhat narrow problem susceptible to a targeted solution. We will switch to “sustainable” everything and we will be able to on as we have.
First of all, all energy use entails waste and error. You can “mix your poisons” to some extent, but it is the sure scale of human population and industry that is creating hazards. To talk of “risk” in regard to global warming is stunted thinking. The industrial revolution continues to accelerate the rate and scope of change. From his first practical steam engine design around 1765 and the expiring of his major patents around 1800, Boulton and Watt produced and installed fewer than 500 engines worldwide. How long do you think it takes today to roll out a new generation of cellphone to a billion users?
I think human beings could grasp and embrace the insight that, collectively, we need to restrain ourselves: that we need in total less work, less activity, and to slow the rate technological progress so that there is to recognize and deal with unexpected consequences at scale. But our overseers do not share that view, as different clue says.
I expect the rich are already calculating that being infinitely rich on a finite planet requires massive population extermination to get to their idea of “sustainable” prosperity, for those remain. It might work, or it might be too late to prevent total unraveling, for nature or for civilization or both.
Plenue
@Herman
South Park mocked Gore by having him running around fearmongering about ‘ManBearPig’, a terrible monster. Over a decade later they realized Gore was right and made an episode where it turns out ManBearPig was real the whole time.
On the topic of geoengineering, it seems to be entirely a fool’s hope. 1. It’s unclear there is anything meaningful we can actually do at this point even if we put all our resources into it, 2. We don’t know what the secondary effects of anything we do will be; they could be worse than climate change itself, 3. You can’t trust any endeavour launched within the framework of generating profit, which is what pretty much inevitably would happen.
The Real News had a good interview on the subject here: https://youtu.be/50HAVYaqRWo
someofparts
Thanks to Stirling for at least making the effort.
Greg Palast thinks Gore lost the election because his rudeness to Ross Perot during their debate alienated the millions of voters that supported Perot. Watching video of that debate these days is chilling, when Gore rolls his eyes while Perot tries to warn him about NAFTA.
Mandos
The last turnoff was earlier than Bush vs. Gore. It came when the primary mode of environmental action came to perceived as self-control over personal consumption, even though people have very limited environmental effect through “reduce, reuse, recycle”, if they participate in any sense in modern life.
Environmentalism came to be associated with a sort of moralized asceticism, without any certainty that your neighbours would follow suit and give up the luxuries that industrial production had made easy to get. From that point, it was easy to draw a line in people’s minds between ascetic restriction on their personal choices, and the regulation of the real primary culprits, heavy industry and resource extraction.
We’d have been in much better shape if environmentalists had focused on control over at-source industrial pollution, rather than attempt to rope people into local solutions that involve high perceived direct inconvenience. A lot of environmentalist ideology is unfortunately highly invested in a localism that hardly anyone wants, and that malinvestment of effort bears a lot of responsibility for where we are today.
Mandos
I have strong doubts that geoengineering would work from a technical standpoint, but that is the entire point of geoengineering, etc. I think it would be great to not have to suffer global consequences, who could possibly be against that?
scruff
Anyone who wants better behavior in the future. In broad strokes I see two methods of reforming human behavior away from harmful anti-social (and in this case anti-ecological) activity and towards pro-social pro-ecological behavior; the first is that through suffering consequences of bad behavior a learning process occurs in which people recognize that their behavior was bad and unsustainable and then they change; the second is through moral development they recognize that what they were doing is wrong and so they change.
The second is – at this point – a pipe dream. I’ve heard my entire life that there was about to be a global rising of consciousness, but every time I look for evidence of this I find none. You yourself just commented that the environmental movement has essentially become a moralized asceticism. I agree, and that’s not a sane or contextual sort of moral development; to me it reads more like the self-blaming behavior of powerless children suffering parental abuse.
I consider it a mistake to expect humans to undergo moral development when bad behavior is subsidized, and consequences preemptively mitigated. What civilization has done to the ecosystem of the planet – and to almost every other species on the planet – is unconscionable. I don’t think anything good can come from rewarding that behavior and allowing civilized humans to be the only species to escape suffering global consequences that were caused entirely by civilized humans.
Admittedly, my ethical outlook is significantly less anthropocentric than most peoples’. YMMV.
Z
I think a strong case could be made that the day the world ended was when the big corporate lap dawg Clinton, after lobbying and pressuring Congress to pass it, signed the bill that granted China permanent normal trade relations. Google Gore on his stance on that! That led to an incredible amount of industrialization, and inefficient and prolific use of fossil fuels, that I’d imagine contributed handily to our global warming. Not to mention the huge environmental damage that’s been done to this planet by China’s rapid industrialization, funded by the flood of U.S. dollars. You can also make the case that that bill, signed as $Bill was ready to leave office to go on his cash-in tour and only a few months before the 2000 Presidential election, led to Bush winning the election, or it being close enough to be stolen, if you’d like.
I don’t think highly of Donald Trump. I’m sure he has screwed over and taken advantage of a lot of people in his business dealings, but between Clinton and all the damage he’s done to the economic structure of this country, and still dutifully does now while continuing to enrich himself, Bush and his casual arrogance and insecure ego that led to hundreds of thousands undeserved Iraqi deaths and all the corporate and Wall Street corruption that he also oversaw during his Administration, and Obama and his outright evil delight in betraying the American people and his narcissism that led him to want to become president and coldly crush those who believed in his hope and change deceit, I’d have to say that Trump is the best human being of the four. As bad as he is, he has less contempt for the American people.
Z
Ché Pasa
I agree that the inadequate and intermittent action (not lack of action) on the looming climate catastrophe is largely if not entirely due to the indifference of the Overclass, not any particular moral failing of the unwashed masses. The Overclass is indifferent to the fate of the Rabble in all things, but particularly with regard to climate change and its many subsidiary effects, most of which have long since been gamed out by Our Rulers, and for which preparations have been made.
In other words, they’re looking out for themselves and don’t care what happens to you or me, and at this point, I don’t think there’s any way to make them care.
Eliminating the Overclass — or at least eliminating its power — still doesn’t leave the rest of us enough time to reverse the rate of climate change. Thus, the key for the rest of us is to be as prepared as we can be. For most of us, that won’t amount to much. But we do what we can, and no matter what else happens, some of us or our descendants will survive. At least until that’s no longer possible.
I suppose once the planet re-adjusts to the new climate regime, the pendulum will start swinging the other way, and many centuries hence, the Earth will enter a(nother) more clement period.
More should have been done a long time ago to mitigate climate change, but it wasn’t. Now I have little doubt it’s too late.
different clue
@Ché Pasa,
The desire for at least some non-Overclass survivors through mitigation or survivalization is what has led me in the past to express the hope that Ian Welsh might decide to create a category of “actionable information for practical survival” to which readers might bring actionable information bearing on all aspects of survivalism and/or links and sources to dump-heaps of such information.
It is only a few more years till the Internet either frays down to extinction or is overtily Kill-Switched by the Overclass to stop us from getting and giving that information. It would be good to spend the next few years remaining until Internet Jackpot harvesting all this information and weaponizing it for dissemination and viralization and downloading back into long-term analog storage media. And also living real-time deployment and practical application along the way.
Mandos
This is part of the underlying ideological conflict and part of the reason why outright climate denialism is far more prevalent on the right than on the left. The right views the problem as being defined in such a way as to, suspiciously, favour a political programme that is based on an ethical outlook they don’t share, ie, climate rescue/mitigation as a means to sneak in an ethical programme in by the back door.
The (very much) other day, on another blog, I remember a right-wing participant asking that, if people really thought climate was a species-survival emergency, what they’d yield up to a skeptical right to prove that they really took it that seriously. That is, if special or Earth survival was really at serious stake, surely the climate left would make key concessions to the denialist right, at least in theory, in order to show that this is a good faith belief and not a dishonest trick to impose a non-anthropocentric, anti-hierarchical political programme. For example, abandoning major aspects of social welfare, in return for the skeptical libertarian right to agree to imposed cuts to industrial emissions. This right-wing commenter implied that none of the left wing participants would concede that, and if I recall correctly, no one did.
I would argue that you can’t really have a piecemeal program of climate mitigation separate from climate and economic justice. But that, of course, is precisely what the denialist right fears and believes is the bad-faith part. Well, I’d say, join the club: economists have been arguing that any kind of left-wing programme violates the Holy Truth Principle of Blahity Welfare Blah…
Phil Perspective
In my opinion Gore is somewhat similar to Jimmy Carter. You could argue that both were neoliberals (some argue that the neoliberal turn in America started under Carter and not Ronald Reagan) but they were right about the environment which is probably the most important issue facing humanity today.
Both were indeed neoliberals. While Gore was right about global warming he likely wouldn’t have taxed the rich at the considerably higher rates necessary. Don’t forget that Gore was among the first crop of DLC Democrats. He was in their leadership.
different clue
Yes, and Gore was very much a Forced Free Trade Warrior. I still remember the TV debate about NAFTA with Gore and Perot. I remember Perot’s wretched unpreparedness for that debate.
He didn’t realize it was about verbal combat and rhetorical tricks. Gore did. And “won the debate” on that basis.
scruff
I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective, but it makes sense of a lot of right-wing denialist behavior. Thanks for the insight.
I’d agree with you, that
…but I’d go further and say that if the underlying functional structure of the culture is flawed, there will inevitably be emergent outcomes similar to the ones we’re talking about WRT climate change. To pick two examples off the top of my head, agriculture appears to be strongly correlated to if not outright based in cultural assumptions that it is morally necessary to provide the greatest possible food resources for as many humans as your society has as is possible, and as an outcome agriculture has been destroying topsoil for a very long time. There is a cultural idea of “away” – as in “to throw something away” – that assumes there is such a place on Earth where waste can be put as it will not negatively affect human habitats, and the outcome result is that even when that waste is put in the middle of the Pacific Ocean it has detrimental effects on human activity. I don’t particularly believe in a micromanaging God or instant Karma, but it seems clear to me that any discordant belief structures people hold (discordant as related to the “harmonies of natural law”, sorry about all the poetic language) have the potential to snowball into physically obvious “punishments”.
And I have no idea what to do about that. Yes, I feel fine being ethically opposed to the ethics of the right-wing. But I don’t at all feel up to the task of changing their minds about these ethical issues. So what’s the best outcome that I can hope for here? Is it possible for a left/right multicultural society to pull through these sorts of problems?
I’m inclined to think that can’t work. I don’t think Nature has the leeway for it. This makes for a very fatalist outlook. I’m just thinking out loud at this point, sorry if anyone considers this rambling a waste of their time.
different clue
@scruff,
An agricultural geneticist/researcher named Wes Jackson tried thinking his way through this problem several decades ago. And then writing his way through it.
He wrote a book called New Roots For Agriculture, which was more about proto-Western and then Western Civilization and its relationship with itself and the land it lives on . . . . than about agriculture itself. He discussed some of the deepest animating myths and belief-foundation-floors of Western Civ and how to upgrade some and replace others for the deepest analysis and re-casting of our relationship with land-based food aquisition and the survival which depends on it. For example, he suggested replacing the Myth of Original Sin with the Myth of Original Innocence and how to Grow Up now that we can’t be Innocent anymore. He discusses the sharp transition from Old Testament theology to New Testament theology as the Myth of the New Truth and suggests how accepting that myth AS a myth and facing up to a survival-genic newer New Truth can help us survive.
He then discusses all the big failures of agriculture to date, and suggests a way out by sidestepping annual row-crop agriculture for a perennial polyculture which he thinks can erase the problems of annual agriculture by erasing annual agriculture . . . since the problems of annual agriculture have proven to be insoluble from within the practice of annual agriculture.
Here is the link to New Roots For Agriculture.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1199194.New_Roots_for_Agriculture
( a little embedded clicky-link allows the sample text to be expanded just a little bit)
Hugh
To limit climate change, manage population, and create sustainable societies and economies would require coordination on a global scale. This is not going to happen. There are too many competing agendas too easily exploited by too many looting elites. This gets wrapped up in: poor and developing countries who also happen to be the most susceptible to the effects of climate change demanding that they should be allowed to continue to pollute/produce CO2 because developed countries got to pollute and are responsible most of the CO2 already out there. So developed countries ship their most polluting industries to these developing countries. Problem solved, right ? As for managing population, this runs into religious taboos in both developed and developing countries as well as cries of genocide in developing ones. Then too we have the phenomena of window dressing efforts like the Paris Accords, and Trumpism, that is climate denialism in developed countries.
So nothing much is happening or is going to happen to confront climate change or population. There is the Green New Deal. It is broad and vague. At most it brings climate change back into the national conversation, but so far it is just talk.
Developed countries remain, despite their lack of serious action, best positioned to survive in some form what is coming. But most of the developing world and with it most of its people is not and they and it will not survive.
As for climate change denial, it is a form of irrationalism. As with flat earthers, libertarians, and Holocaust and evolution deniers, this is not a case where there are two legitimate sides to the debate. It is pointless to argue or negotiate with such people. You won’t change their mind with logic or evidence. All you will do is elevate their delusion and give it a veneer of legitimacy. If you do debate them, do it for laughs because that is all you will get out of the exercise.
George Job
At the current rate of eco system loss, insect die off, exceeding 400 PPM Co2 etc. the deep adaptation required will not be mitigated in time. After reading these comments it is apparent some think if you are a member of an elite conduit AKA over class or something, you will get a pass. What part of turning Earth’s climate into Venus do you not understand?
Long before acidic oceans over take land mass, crop failure leads us to starvation and temperatures on the planet rise to the point life will not exist, the actual air we all, (meaning every being) breathe stops.
So if you perceive wealth or class or right or left somehow insulates you or you are able to grow some Venus approved lungs or something, there is no discussion.
The fact of the matter is every time you turn on an electric light, make a booze run in your vehicle, order on line running shoes, or the countless other fossil fuel sucking acts of our daily lives, we are replacing air with toxins.
I think of it this way. Somebody offs themselves by idling the family car in a closed garage. Consider our planet much like the garage. It’s really not that hard to understand what happens next.
bruce wilder
As for climate change denial, it is a form of irrationalism. As with flat earthers, libertarians, and Holocaust and evolution deniers, this is not a case where there are two legitimate sides to the debate. It is pointless to argue or negotiate with such people. You won’t change their mind with logic or evidence. All you will do is elevate their delusion and give it a veneer of legitimacy. If you do debate them, do it for laughs because that is all you will get out of the exercise.I
That denial makes argument pointless may be a feature, not a bug from the standpoint of the denialist, no? I am not so certain that denial is “irrational” so much as it is motivated reasoning of a sort, motivated by resentment and a desire to resist when given no choice when confronted with a sweeping cultural and economic agenda.
I think we underestimate how much thinking-thru needs to happen before a sufficient policy regime could be conceived let alone instituted. Denialism on the right may be a problem with the right, but right-wing tribalism has become a problem for left or progressive thinking as well, because instead of thinking-thru, so many leftish are satisfied with feeling superior to the denialists, without exposing their own glib understanding to critical revision.
Declaring “the science is settled!” is not the same as either really understanding the science or the economic implications and imperatives. Mainstream economics is worse than useless, per usual, but that just compounds the problem that the general public has not invested much real effort in understanding the issues. Much of the Media are pre-occupied with simple, dramatic narratives, that are less than educational.
Beyond a modicum of public understanding, there is also the need to have some calculated estimate of how the infrastructure of political economy could be structured to achieve the threshold necessary to the survival of some civilization and most of the natural world. Basic magnitudes have been neither calculated nor published — I am referring to economic variables and parameters rather than climate system or ecological dynamics.
Willy
I guess Pablo Escobar did start blowing shit up when they came after him. Too much money to lose. Maybe our energy barons would be a bit more discrete. But I don’t recall tobacco barons or their consumers jumping out of tall buildings. This is different, a lot more people economics involved, but would a well-calculated climate economics policy offer them a way out?
(As for their tools, their tribalist minions… ridicule is too much fun.)
different clue
@George Job,
I feel confident in assuring you that there are no members of the Overclass on these threads. And I don’t think that we think that the Overclass will survive Condition Venus any better than the rest of us . . . down there in their underground bunkers.
But I think that they think that they will. And I was offering my best guess as to how the Overclasses think they can make Global Warming work for them.
different clue
@Hugh,
I think it would be fun to point out to Climate Decay deniers that if they are truly confident in their belief that there is no global warming/ weather chaos/ climate decay under way . . . . that they have laid out before them some tremendous contrarian investing opportunities.
If they were to catalog all the things the rest of us expect to happen on a heating-up planet, which will eventually be things that lead to price drops and value drops of some assets in some places as those places become unlivable and uninsurable, they could buy land and other assets in just exactly those places and be well positioned to take full advantage of the price and value recovery when the rest of us discover there was no global warming after all. Which is what they say they expect the rest of us to discover.
We should encourage all deniers everywhere to buy coastal seaside oceanfront property, and go live there, and make their lives and careers there, for example.
robert
\”We should encourage all deniers everywhere to buy coastal seaside oceanfront property, and go live there, and make their lives and careers there, for example.\”
Interesting! It appears the AGW advocates and loudest voices are buying such properties? Gore et al.?
Billikin
Back in the 80s I was invited on an online political forum to take the liberal side in a proposed debate about conservatism vs. liberalism. I declined, as I did not consider myself a liberal, but I proposed a debate about conservatism vs. conservation. Nobody took me up on that offer. 😉 I grew up in a conservative area, but most conservative adults believed in conservation. But by the 1980s it seemed to me that conservatives in the US were largely anti-environmental. The usual argument against environmental regulation was economic, namely the loss of jobs. So I was a bit surprised that nobody in that group, most of whom feared a bloodbath by Blacks in South Africa if apartheid were to end, was willing to take the anti-conservation side.
I learned about global warming in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s the danger of global warming was accepted wisdom in the US, regardless of political beliefs. After all, we could see the results of conservation and anti-pollution efforts. The results were plain, and generally people thought that the costs had been worth it. As for current denialism, motivated reasoning, as Bruce Wilder indicates, is part of it, but IMO it is mostly the result of a relentless propaganda campaign, starting in the early 1990s, by those who profit from the production of greenhouse gases. (BTW, instead of talking about the greenhouse effect, shouldn’t we talk about the Venus effect? Those clouds shrouding Venus are not composed of water vapor, bringing life giving rain, but CO2, which keeps the surface at around 900 degree Fahrenheit, IIRC. Runaway global warming on earth is possible, if we just keep burning fossil fuels.
By now the results of the lack of global warming are plain. It is no longer a theoretical question, it has arrived. The warming of the oceans is indisputable, along with the death of coral reefs and the incipient loss of fisheries, the melting of both land and sea glaciers cannot be denied, nor can desertification, the destruction of rainforests and increasing natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, monsoons, and wildfires. As Bill Maher pointed out last week, the reply to the question of the economic costs of environmental regulation is the question of the economic costs of environmental non-regulation.
I am not a doom and gloomer. By the 1990s the fish had returned to the rivers in Tokyo. Who would have thought it? Killer smog is no more. We no longer have to argue about science, all we have to do is point out the environmental damage caused by a couple of decades of neglect. People will respond to perceived problems, even at economic cost. President Carter, in his so-called malaise speech, urged people to cut back on their energy usage, and they did, at a cost not only of their personal sacrifices, but also of a slowing of economic activity. In a consumer economy, the consumers cut back their spending.
Looking into the future, if we do cut back on the burning of fossil fuel, a conservation economy seems likely to be slow growth. OC, most of human economic history has been one of slow growth, but slow economic growth may put in peril the modern idea of progress. If things in general are not getting better, what will be the reaction of the poor and working classes? Traditional hierarchical societies kept the workers down. If we avoid environmental catastrophe, can we avoid political and social catastrophes?
Hugh
Bruce wilder, I agree. Reading through the Green New Deal, it seemed like a wishlist to me. It lacked structure. How did it all fit to together and how could it be executed? I think we need to start with a kind of census of where we are now. Where does most of our green house gas production come from in our society? In this, we need to take into account CO2 production from goods we buy abroad and the amount of CO2 created in transporting them here. We need to factor in things like urban sprawl, car-size/car-use, immigration, and population. And then we need to provide alternatives and how to get to them. And we should make what we learn to everyone on the planet to at least give them the chance to act upon it.
Someone I was talking with recently commented that with irrational thought it is conclusion first, argument fit and twisted to arrive at it. To me, that sounds like your “motivated reasoning.”
different clue, I always wonder how it is that the same scientific method which gave climate change deniers electricity, their cars, computers, smart phones, the drugs they need to cure their infections, the operations to save their lives somehow fell down with climate change or evolution. I asked one once, and he said, “It’s all about grants, the money.” That seemed sufficient for him even though it implied a mind-boggling complete fraud perpetrated by one group of scientists on everyone else, including all other scientists. He would also occasionally reference some unknown “scientific” study which took issue with some aspect of climate science and say it took out the whole field. He would then ignore or say was bought the thousands of reports which contradicted his view. So sure, we can encourage them to put their money and lives where their mouth is, but mostly to see what dodge they use to change the subject.
Billikin, it all depends on what you mean by growth and progress. If we can guarantee that everyone will get the medical care they need, food, shelter, a meaningful job, the education they want, and be covered in their old age, then to me that’s progress. It is progress if we can manage our society responsibly and sustainably, if we can minimize our carbon footprint, pollution, and impact on our environment and ecologies.
Ten Bears
“Growth” is by nature a perpetual motion machine, bound by the laws of nature to fail.
Billikin
@ Hugh
I first started reading economics blogs early in 2008, not because of the looming crisis, which I did not perceive, but to try to find out about the possibilities for ecologically sound economies. I already knew that sustainable ecologies were in energy balance with their environments. Humans are not. I also knew that rapid and increasing energy use rapidly and increasingly generates entropy, that is, makes energy unavailable. A term for maximum entropy is heat death. On a global scale the maximum sustainable energy usage is that provided by the sun, and that is not just for humans, but for all life. I guess we should include geothermal energy, as well. What humans are doing is raiding our piggy bank of stored energy, in the form of fossil fuels. Somehow we seem to think that that can go on forever. The Venus effect tells us that by releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere the time for our scale of energy usage is much more limited than the amount of coal, oil, and natural gas would indicate. The only sustainable energy is renewable energy, i.e., energy from the sun, in the form of wind, water, and solar power, and only a fraction of that is for human use.
If we move to sustainable energy use, what standard of living can we sustain? That of the Middle Ages? The Dark Ages? Now we have electricity, so maybe that of Africa today. Maybe that of 1970s Germany. The models of ecologically sound advanced economies that I had in 2008 were ancient Egypt and Tokugawa Japan, one because it was limited by the Sahara desert, the other because it was a self-sufficient island with an official environmental policy to preserve its forests. Neither had our modern ideas of economic growth and progress. IIUC, Tokugawa Japan experienced slow economic growth through cottage industry.
What do I mean by economic growth? What the economists say. By progress I mean our modern Western idea of progress. In our era, both are generated by massive energy use, mainly through the burning of fossil fuel. Our scale of energy use is unsustainable, and burning fossil fuel is even less sustainable. We will stop using energy like we do, one way or other. The question is when, and the question is whether we do so voluntarily.
Willy
Gore and Feinstein display part of the problem. Since neither will feel the impacts in their own lifetime they rationalize any of their own anti-green behaviors which conflicts with their beliefs. I understand the poor environmentalist man needing a woodstove to save money, but the wealthy Gore and Feinstein display a sort of “deficits don’t matter” mentality. It’s like a physician I know who’s fully aware that the health care system is corrupt and broken yet won’t rock the boat on behalf of his children’s future, because his own personal lifestyle depends on it. Some part of their humanity seems broken. And we’re also dealing with this… thing on a cultural level.
George Job
@different clue
thanks for the clarification, it probably was obvious for anyone except for the occasional newbie as myself. Seems I always have an issue with class difference. Would love for people to be seamless…
Joan
@different clue,
I think it’s a good idea to read about such things. I got started on my “collapsed” lifestyle with the book Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush. There are communities online sharing resources, from homesteaders to apartment-dwellers just getting started. I realized years ago that I was looking through a different lens than most, having had grandparents who grew up during the Dust Bowl. Victory gardens, canning and preserves, keeping small animals like chickens and rabbits to help with your garden, using technology that doesn’t require electricity, etc. Knowing your neighbors, having a tight-knit civic community. I grew up knowing how to catch and prepare fish, and was disk shooting once I was big enough that a twelve gauge wouldn’t knock me over. My grandmother’s home remedies were under the assumption that access to general medical care was not an option. Things like that. I’m not saying the world will look exactly like it did back then, but as things destabilize, these are probably good skills to already have practiced.
ponderer
Models are very hard to get right. Even simple systems are difficult at scale. Pretending like we understand such a complex system as earth’s climate is a mistake. It invites uncertainty whenever the models are updated. So is much pseudo science, I cringe when I see someone talking about Entropy destroying the planet. It’s ok, get a steam engine for the house. There’s this big heat sink called Space, that will keep us going at least until the sun swallows the earth.
Whatever the outcome, panic isn’t going to help. Careful, reasoned preparation is necessary. There will be a lot of migrations, and push for new resources, but that’s part of the human condition. Unless you are on the coast it’s probably not that big a deal. It’s a much bigger deal if we continue to poison what we have left. Wilderness survival skills aren’t going to help. Neither is calling wildfires or hurricanes “proof”. Reason doesn’t have a political affiliation, stock options in Carbon futures, or a vested interest in click throughs.
Willy
Freeman Dyson is often quoted by deniers. He agrees with AGW, but doesn’t believe the models can be very accurate at all.
Yet… testing models for veracity by hindcasting is pretty much oceanographic and meteorological Modeling 101. I don’t know about the tolerancing, but it’s been said that scientists can’t get their models to work when testing against the historic instrumental record, if they don’t add in the extra manmade CO2 to the model. So why somebody as esteemed as Dyson… Maybe he’s a perfectionist.
I”m a bit concerned about the seeming tendency to underestimate though.
Billikin
@ ponderer
Sure, when we have lost our atmosphere, the surface of the earth will be as cold as space. That may be the ultimate heat death for any kind of life on earth. As for entropy as the unavailability of energy, if the surface of the earth ever reaches 451 degrees Fahrenheit, we will be unable to burn carbon for energy. OC, we will be long dead. 😉 More close to home is the question of peak production of oil, which occurred in the US in the 1970s and seems to have occurred worldwide in the first decade of this century. Consider the devastation of hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. That is an example of entropy. Another word for entropy is disorder. The more profligate we are in our energy use, the more disordered the world becomes. The time constant, up to now has been on the order of decades, but when so-called hundred year storms have become the norm, we are reaping the whirlwind.
Stirling S Newberry
You would be amazed by how 70% tax rates will do the job.
That and using a tax on borrowing to change currencies.
ponderer
That’s not what “heat death” means (when we are talking about entropy). It means there isn’t enough free energy left to do anything. No temperature differential to perform work. Its like 10^106 years away and will be very cold by our standards. Complete darkness, etc. Natural disasters are not an example of entropy. If the planets didn’t dissipate heat energy they would be as luminous as the sun. That’s where the entropy (energy / temperature) goes, space. When the stars don’t have enough fuel left to generate and give off heat, that’s “heat death”. If the equilibrium of the energy given off by the earth minus the energy received by the earth + that generated here (burning fossil fuel), goes positive it gets colder. If negative, it gets warmer. Of course that’s amortized across the planet.
Questioning a model doesn’t invalidate the science. So if we can predict a large volcanic eruption in 15 years that lowers the temperature by some amount OR melting permafrost releasing methane that increases the warming 2x what we predicted, then we could start calling each other idiots. We can’t do that. The point is that tribalism is no substitute for science. Science is about being open to possibilities which includes being wrong, and sometimes spectacularly wrong. Too many are using the science of climate change to make a buck so it behooves us to be level headed. The tobacco companies screwed us over when they started pushing fake science to help their legal and PR issues. Look up junk science.com some time.
My point was that every time we see a (perceived) success or failure in the model we’ll be at each others throats. Like with the California wildfires Climate Scientists say weren’t an indication of global warming, or record snow storms that don’t mean there isn’t any warming. Instead we should be honest with each other about what a model is and set specific short term goals that we can actually accomplish.
Billikin
The earth is not a closed system, so entropy does not necessarily increase in it. Yes, the energy that it gets from the sun is dissipated into space. But global warming does indicate an increase of entropy in the earth system.
Heat death is an informal term, originally used for maximum entropy in the universe. I in no way applied it except for maximum entropy, although not necessarily for the universe as a whole.
Entropy also has different meanings. Unavailability of energy is one. Peak oil production meets that definition. Disorder is another. Natural catastrophes meet it. There is another meaning for ecology, which I would have to look up. One definition of information is negative entropy.
Anyway. we do need to look beyond the production of greenhouse gases. The atmosphere itself keeps the earth warmer than the moon. (As does geothermal energy.) Continued energy use at our current scale would eventually heat up the atmosphere, just not as fast as the burning of fossil fuel.
Mature ecologies are in energy balance with their environments. We are out of energy balance with our environment. That is unsustainable.
Billikin
Not to be misunderstood, I do not think that our rate of energy usage, without the production of greenhouse gases, would heat up the earth as much in the limit.
Donna Curtis
All I can say on climate change is that anybody who supports Trump (either by voting for him or not voting for an alternative that can actually win) does not take climate change or women’s rights seriously. Not only is Trump a climate change denier but he and his cronies are doing everything they can to rip contraception and abortion services away from women.
A woman who has trouble controlling her fertility cannot participate in climate change activism. She will be too busy being used as a breeding cow which is the worst thing possible for population control.
Hugh
Donna Curtis, my view is that if the Democrats choose a candidate they describe as centrist/moderate/pragmatic/bipartisan, i.e. conservative, or if it is some neoliberal who only plays lip service to progressives, then they are telling me they don’t want my vote. No one owns my vote but me. If someone wants my vote, they must give me substantive positive reasons for it. I have been done with the lesser of two evils for years. So if all the Democrats have to offer me is that their candidate is marginally less horrible than Trump or whoever the Republican candidate is, they can go to hell.
bruce wilder
Science is hard work. Really hard work, when done right.
People (I include my own lovely self) want it easy. The vast majority of human beings, by nature, want narrative stories that get to what it all means as quickly as possible. Real science is about something else: how it all works. Very different propositions: meaning and function.
Climate science is all about discovering how the earth\’s climate system(s) work together to produce the chaotic systems we experience as the weather (itself the subject of the science of meteorology). Strictly speaking there\’s no \”meaning\” involved in their modeling and analysis of the dynamics of atmospheric and oceanic energy exchange.
All the political talk surrounding climate change is about meaning: competing attempts to tell compelling and motivating stories.
I do not imagine that politics can ever get beyond its stories. A better politics can get to something closer to a true story, which is to say, closer to policy that is consistent enough with the ways things work that the policy does not blow up in the face of reality. We need policy to work; policies that blow up are destructive and wasteful. So, policy has to be informed about and adjusted to what works, about how the systems and phenomena policy addresses function.
Like it or not, politics gets us to policy by means of compelling stories. In the absence of any other factor, the stories people like best are not the true stories per se (dear reader, please read \”true stories\” with a note of irony) so much as the stories that entertain or give satisfactory meaning to their audience. Factual accuracy may be a factor in the credibility of the storyteller as well as the story, but other qualities of the story factor in the credulousness of the audience.
Climate science, by itself, is not a story. The closest science routinely comes to story-telling is the explanation. Some people think science is the business primarily of seeking or fabricating explanations; they are idiots. But, science does produce explanations, in which scientific analysis and facts are applied to construct a somewhat stylized narrative of \”cause-and-effect\” as a bridge to common understanding. A good explanation is usually too short on drama to be a good story, but a good explanation will be actionable.
Right now, I think the politics of climate change and ecological collapse face several major story-telling challenges.
One of those challenges is that we do not have much familiarity with any part of climate other than local weather. In the absence of real immersion in the science, not many people have much of any reference or basis for critical thinking — and so, overall, there\’s not much pressure to improve the factual basis for the stories.
Another of those challenges is that mainstream economics — in the dogmas and style of which most educated people receive some instruction as it is the ritual language of policy litany — is a Big Lie in Goebbels\’ sense. There\’s relevant stuff in economics, but it is buried under a lot of nonsense apologizing for the sociopathologies of billionaires and their favorite grifters.
Bill Maher, of course, is not a professional economist and speaks the truth as a joke.
Those two challenges are mostly about the credibility of the storytellers and the ability of the good guys to get quality air-time. People can learn more science and better economics. And, I think we have grossly underestimated how much of that instruction the body politic needs before we can get decent policy or just forward movement. If I were advising the Green New Deal folks, I would prescribe a parallel PBS to air documentaries on the science and the economics pretty much full-time, plus lots of weekend seminars and networking — orders of magnitude more than is currently underway.
But, a deeper challenge has to do with the credulousness of the audience. We live immersed in propaganda and we are on cognitive overload as it is. I am not sure climate change denialism is irrationalism so much as an instinct for mental self-preservation.
Propaganda works when it satisfies the hunger for meaning with a quick fix. That is how we got the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, I think. It is what the liberal / neocon obsession with R2P is all about. It is why people are so worried about the national debt they are willing to give up Social Security. And, those are narratives chosen by self-interested elites for their policy consequences.
But, human irrationality does not begin and end with a river in Egypt.
I think stories of a millennial apocalypse are satisfying. The idea that climate change could transform earth into Venus or that the collapse of civilization may be imminent. (I myself actually believe civilization is likely to collapse, but I imagine it will take three hundred years or more. But, I also choose to believe it, because I find the story intriguing and entertaining in a way.)
We do not have enough common knowledge and these archetypal stories (collapse of civilization or science denialism among them) fill the void. And, the propaganda networks cum clickbait machines that the billionaires have substituted for news media and universities are very comfortable amplifying the entertainment value of whatever stories we like, within a void they have no incentive to fill responsibly.
ponderer
As someone who has studied thermodynamics, what your saying about Entropy is incorrect. It’s one of the more complicated measures sure basically, its some abstract term that doesn’t have a lot of physical meaning at least in the way you would think. It’s not energy, its not lack of energy but its related. In an open system such as the earth it’s the inverse of the temperature differential. As long as we have a large heat sink (space) and a heat source (solar, gravitational, etc.) it’s going to be low entropy. When a hurricane travels up the gulf coast and it gets energy from the warm water, that’s not entropy, its the opposite. You get more energy from the difference in the temperatures. If the air and water are closer in temperature you get less energy. In a closed system the air and the water have the same temperature, so no hurricane. High entropy, but no thunder storms. It has nothing to do with fossil fuel or any of that other stuff.
But global warming does indicate an increase of entropy in the earth system.
Not really. Because its an open system our ability to do work increases with temperature differential. If people would use the term energy instead of entropy there wouldn’t be so many issues. Even scientists have trouble with entropy. I suspect they bandy it about to the public as a form of trolling.
Billikin
Thanks for the definition of entropy in an open system. For the earth, it is the inverse of the temperature differential between what and what? Thanks.
BTW, I did not say that the hurricane getting energy from the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico was an example of entropy, I said that the damage done by the hurricane represented an increase in entropy. (At least, that’s what I meant.)
Are you claiming that burning fossil fuel had nothing to do with the heating of the Gulf?
Billikin
@ ponderer
If you don’t mind, what about Venus? Underneath the cloud cover it is very hot. Is the Venus system high entropy or low entropy? Thanks.
metamars
“Whatever you may think of Gore, and I think he’s a coward, he was, ummmm, serious about climate change.”
Meh.
Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” had 9 significant errors, according to a British Court. https://abcnews.go.com/US/TenWays/story?id=3719791
That includes, “4.) There is a direct coincidence between the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the rise in temperature over the last 650,000 years. (“Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”)”
This doubtless refers to the ice core data. But the graph – which comnpletely convinced me, when I saw the film – obscures the fact temperatures rose hundreds of years BEFORE CO2 started rising. (Rising temperatures mean less CO2 can be dissolved in the oceans, so of course it’s released into the atmosphere.) At the resolution that was presented, this is not obvious – a fact doubtless known to James Hanson, Gore’s scientific trickster, but perhaps not to Gore.
(I’ve since seen subsequent analyses which shows that the global warming had a hemispheric phase to it, making the CO2 catastrophist interpretation more plausible. This was many years after “An Inconvenient Truth”, so my low opinion of Hanson’s honesty remains.)
It hard for me to believe that Gore didn’t know that the film (“Climate 101”) he did with Bill Nye, the “science guy”, was fraudulent. I wrote a diary on this: https://shadowproof.com/2012/12/11/al-gorebill-nye-climate-101-video-found-to-be-fraudulent-how-you-can-replicate-the-experiment-yourself/ AFAIK, neither Gore nor Nye have ever apologized for this fraud, much less retracted “Climate 101”.
It’s striking to me that left-leaning people, who seem cognizant enough that many of our governments are largely corrupted, can’t seem to process corruption in the scientific establishments. There is, additionally, other deep-seated dysfunction in scientific communities that have more to do with tribalism and fundamental human irrationality, than with any money-related corruption. Lee Smolin, in his book “The Trouble with Physics”, delved into this aspect of things. Scientists, themselves, are mostly blind to the sort of dysfunction that anthropologists have extensively chronicled.
See also the very recent “The Crisis of Science” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfHEuWaPh9Q&t=1388s.
Like the ubiquitous corruption of the US government, there seems to be LITTLE EFFORT to correct this dysfunction; at least, no effort that is broad in scope. Hence, the ‘null hypothesis’ is – says me – that the dysfunction will persist, indefinitely. (In fairness, there’s more disclosure of conflicts of interest than there used to be. I haven’t been following this issue all that closely. But I’m pretty confident that, e.g., if the replication crisis had been largely alleviated, I would have heard about it.)
This lack of remedies being pursued is a convenient truth for people whose confirmation bias is being well served.
Hugh
metamars illustrates the irrational conclusion first, argument second I was talking about. Note he does not quote from the most recent IPCC special report or the 4th US Climate Assessment. Meanwhile Trump is reportedly going to put together his own panel to assess climate change. The likely head of this panel is a notorious climate change denier William Happer. Happer is a retired Princeton physicist, but not a climate scientist. He currently is a member of Trump’s National Security Council in charge of emerging technologies, which is scary enough. Happer loves himself some CO2. He has talked of the demonization of CO2 as akin to the Holocaust. No seriously, you can not make this shit up.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/white-house-climate-panel-william-happer/
As for an Inconvenient Truth, it came out in 2006. In early 2007, educational authorities decided to show the film to UK high school students. In May 2007, a truck driver Stewart Dimmock sued. Dimmock was a supporter of the New Party and a stand-in for its founder the hereditary peer Lord Monckton, a neocon, neoliberal, climate change denying conservative kook. The judge found nine errors for which guidance was suggested, but allowed the film to be shown since he found it broadly accurate. You can see the nine Gore points, the judge’s assessment, and other scientific views here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimmock_v_Secretary_of_State_for_Education_and_Skills
All this is about a film from 13 years ago. Ages in terms of climate research. Even the wiki article is a bit dated in its citations, but the point is the scientific consensus since has on several of the “errors”: coral bleaching, effects on polar bears, storm severity, effects of ice melt, moved much closer to Gore’s positions.
Climate change deniers fundamentally do not understand the scientific method. Instead of theory improving, expanding, and correcting as more data come in, explanations become more sophisticated, and predictions more accurate, climate change deniers demand that climate change theory must be perfect and comprehensive from the get-go. Even as they demand this of the consensus scientific view, they take as gospel every oddity coming from their own cottage industry of climate change denying goofs.
metamars
@hugh
In responding to remarks about Gore’s “seriousness,” there is absolutely no need to quote from an IPCC report. Gore’s most convincing point (at least for me, and I’m sure millions of others) in “An Inconvenient Truth”, was misleadingly presented, and his “Climate 101” was fraudulent.
The seriousness of a serious fraud and hack needn’t be taken seriously!
Your comment, thus, doesn’t even pass a logical fallacy smell test. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring ).
As for what ethical scientific debate and and ethical scientific processes should look like, this is also discussed by Smolin. Smolin was mostly motivated by the smothering influence of the string theory proponents amongst particle physics groups, but his analysis was more general. (Hence the title of his book.)
Gore is also a serious intellectual coward, because not only does he refuse all debates (which I’m OK with, as he’s no expert), but he also does nothing to encourage domain experts to have debates (which I’m not OK with, given his advocacy). Says Gore “The science is settled”. So Gore has DISCOURAGED debate. He is, thus, a sort of anti-scientist.
If it makes anybody happy, I suppose that I could agree with the statements “Gore is a serious anti-scientist” and “Gore is seriously anti-science”.
metamars
It is inaccurate to call Happer a “climate change denier”. Like other scientists, with some background or awareness of the field, who are similarly slimed, he has never denied that climate changes.
Likewise, he doesn’t deny that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will create a heating effect on the earth. By his own account, he has actually worked on a climate model that tried to account for the green house gas effects of CO2. (It also ran hot, contrary to subsequent observations.)
As CO2 catastrophism is basically premised on computer models, one could say that Happer is more of a climate scientist than David Suzuki, a famous but amusing guy that went around parroting memes about a great, ONGOING extinction, but couldn’t name a single species that had gone extinct, when challenged to do so. https://www.therebel.media/should_david_suzuki_be_jailed
There’s no point asking you to explain the obvious distinction between the two – how one guy is classified as a “climate scientist”, but the other one is not – but other people should be able to figure it out, if they have an open mind.
We can probably agree on this point, however: One of these two gentlemen – Suzuki or Happer – is a clown.
Here’s another clue: http://tinyurl.com/ycsjwyml
Bonus link: here is Happer bamboozling (or whatever) the physics community at Berkeley (one of the top physics programs in the world). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_OjGxrlloE
Mandos
For scientists in general, debates are bad. I encourage most scientists to refuse to engage in organized debates. The debate format, even the written debate format in comment sections like these, are strictly for the entertainment of the participants, and maybe their *mutual* education at its best. Debating as an adversarial “show” on scientific topics encourages a sense of epistemic equality among the participants. This is deeply corrupting and no one should ever do it.
ponderer
@Billikin
Venus has very little temperature differential across its surface. Low temperature difference = high entropy. Now lets look at the moon. It has almost no atmosphere. Temps during the day up to 127C and at night -173C, big temperature difference, very low entropy. Do you want high entropy or low entropy? Either way you die very quickly. This is why we shouldn’t use entropy when talking about climate. It’s not a measure like Temperature or concentration (O2,CO2, etc.) that makes intuitive sense to people. Like imaginary numbers its good for some calculations, but it’s usefulness outside those domains is limited. It sounds fancier than heat or enthalpy or internal energy, but we should use those instead.
bruce wilder
Ms Ocasio-Cortez addressed criticism she has faced from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress at a New York Hall of Science event.
“You know what? I don’t care anymore, because at least I’m trying and they’re not,” she said.
“I just introduced the Green New Deal two weeks ago and it’s creating all of this conversation, why? Because no one else has even tried.”
“So people are like ‘Oh it’s unrealistic, oh it’s vague, oh it doesn’t address this little minute thing’ and I’m like ‘You try! You do it!’ Because you’re not, so until you do it, I’m the boss, How about that?”
Billikin
@ ponderer
Thanks for your reply about Venus. I did think that the Venus system was high entropy, as you said. That was why it seemed to me that the result of the greenhouse effect upon the earth, which is a step towards a Venus-like system, raised the entropy of the earth system.
Billikin
climate change deniers demand that climate change theory must be perfect and comprehensive from the get-go.
If you truly believe that the science of climate change is unsettled, shouldn’t the response be one of prudence and caution, not full speed ahead?
Mandos
This is a way more complicated issue than a lot of people on the “climate left” seem to think. The Precautionary Principle seems like common sense, right? But it too is an ideological and ethical question. For many deniers/doubters, the “prudence and caution” is not implementing restrictions on the “natural” development of commerce/property and technology, and “recklessness” is following models with high error bars into a planned economy.
It is not possible to get around this ideological difference with More Scientific Debate.
Willy
Debating as an adversarial “show” on scientific topics encourages a sense of epistemic equality among the participants. This is deeply corrupting and no one should ever do it.
So if one is working in a technical field and they find themselves under political attack disguised (as is often the case) as an attack on one’s competency, they shouldn’t defend themselves?
Willy
The world metamars appears to be advocating for is one where no human or human group can possibly be an authority unless they proclaim to be in league with some higher spiritual power.
Billikin
Mandos: “The Precautionary Principle seems like common sense, right? But it too is an ideological and ethical question. For many deniers/doubters, the “prudence and caution” is not implementing restrictions on the “natural” development of commerce/property and technology, and “recklessness” is following models with high error bars into a planned economy.”
Good point. But in my own experience I have never seen in public anyone bring the precautionary principle up in response to climate deniers. What I have seen is responses like, “You don’t understand the science,” or “You’re irrational.” Invoking the precautionary principle admits that the denier may be right, and people don’t seem to want to do that. (IMX, OC. YMMV.)
BTW, I do not like the idea of the “climate left”. In the 1980s the right wingers who wanted to debate me were not willing to take an anti-conservation stance. And the Bush I administration was not against protecting the environment. And Lester Thurow, an economist who seemed kind of leftist to me, thought that the cost of pollution was enough to control it. IMO, it’s not that a climate left has formed, it is that the right wing has embraced denial over the past 30 years or so.
Mandos
Climate change denialists do not mean “debate” in the sense of “defend oneself in the public eye”. They mean someone designated to argue with them, on an equal footing.
Mandos
Billikin: the right embraced climate change denialism at about the rate at which Internet libertarianism (or at least economic libertarianism of that style) became a driving force in conservative circles, and the part of the right that had feelings for noblesse oblige and stewardship vanished entirely.
Actually, the movie Iron Lady about Margaret Thatcher has a number of good illustrations of this process in the British context, i.e., the frustrations that motivated a revolt of the petit bourgeois, ironically focused against coal miners and an extractive working class, but resulting in a gradual displacement of ideologies held by the “old money” right.
This left-right division on the issue becomes sharper when we see the scale of what is required for an industrial society to live in balance with the environment: making the central planning of public goods, at some level, work. Instead, what environmentalist discourse is permitted to become mainstream is focused on consumer goods, and the fear that consumer goods would be subject to “direct” central control, which then feeds back into right-wing libertarian discourses that environmentalists are the “real” (socialist) risk-takers…
Mandos
FWIW here’s my old sort-of-review of Iron Lady at my other bloggy gig: http://drdawgsblawg.ca/2013/10/a-song-of-tea-and-iron.shtml
metamars
@Willy
“The world metamars appears to be advocating for is one where no human or human group can possibly be an authority unless they proclaim to be in league with some higher spiritual power.”
You seem to have so thoroughly internalized some politically motivated narratives, that you react to them even when there are no hooks provided. I’m not sure whether you completely imagined such a hook in anything I wrote, or whether you read something I wrote that kinda, sorta, maybe reminds you of a hook.
You remind me of Walter, in the movie “The Big Lebowski”, whose spiel about his Vietnam buddes dying, had nothing to do with current events. We have that on the word of no less than the Dude:
“Walter
Those rich fucks! This whole fucking thing — I did not watch my buddies die face down in the muck so that this fucking strumpet…
The Dude
I don’t see any connection to Vietnam, Walter.
Walter
Well, there isn’t a literal connection, Dude.
The Dude
Walter, face it, there isn’t any connection”
But party on, anyway, dude! You just may save the world from us “deniers”!
bruce wilder
Science is a never-ending debate of sorts and science presumes epistemic equality among the participants.
I would not say that translates well to a shoutfest on CNN, which I do not think anyone should participate in.
I do think people need to participate in some kind of educative process in order to understand the basic outline of the science of climate change and that probably does not entail having some half-baked dogma shoved down their throats. People are going to disagree — they will always have different values, different interests. Accepting and understanding in some minimal way and in common the climate science has to allow for people continuing to have opposed viewpoints. Which indicates to me the need for something more like a dialectic and less like a debate.
metamars made some points about the Al Gore visual polemic, An Inconvenient Truth, which highlighted for me the self-defeating nature of polemic in this context. The attacks on the veracity of various Gore claims were not pure of motive, but it was the failure to respond adequately with revision and clarification that defeated the educative purpose I think is needed. For some people, Gore’s film has been “discredited” and that’s it.
Engaging in a clarifying back-and-forth can be difficult and challenging, and may be especially so when critics and paid opponents are calling out “fraud” and so forth. But, that’s politics. It ain’t beanbag, as some wag put it. Whether it is televised or not, that’s the way political debates are conducted — that is, with at least some amoral engagement.
I cannot gaze at the recent history of public opinion in the U.S. regarding any number of issues and be very optimistic. The country that responded to 9/11 by invading a country that had nothing to do with it and whose leaders paid no price for that fraud is pretty useless when it comes to collective critical thinking.
A centrist Left that offered the country a monster like Hillary Clinton and cannot explain why she lost except by reference to Russia,Russia,Russia is at least as stupid in its own way as the Right they nominally resist. Insisting that my tribe is rational and their tribe is irrational and cannot possibly be engaged respectfully is a lot like insisting that Trump supporters are deplorable racists/sexism and racism/sexism are the only and sufficient explanation of their discontents.
I am not re-assured by the sophistication of, say, the IPCC reports, which seem to be written by committee with a constipated insistence on being impenetrable, compounded by a complete inability to get thru the economics to an outline of actionable policy strategies.
The basics of climate change and ecological collapse are challenging for people to absorb. Its time-scale, the sometimes abstract modes of discussion and analysis can be daunting. Even very, very smart people who try to engage deeply with it seem prone to go off into the dark and never come back. And, the desire of an author or pundit to get a reaction from any available audience for whatever is said about climate change or the broader problems of resource depletion, overpopulation or ecological collapse runs up against the strong preference of the audience for satisfying soundbites and easy-to-grasp moral narratives (and that includes feeling superior to those others).
Willy
It’s striking to me that left-leaning people, who seem cognizant enough that many of our governments are largely corrupted, can’t seem to process corruption in the scientific establishments.
So you’re going to root out this corruption by quoting the Big Lebowski?
Willy
Climate change denialists do not mean “debate” in the sense of “defend oneself in the public eye”. They mean someone designated to argue with them, on an equal footing.
There will always be skeptics of every kind. AGW denialism is at almost on the same level as moon landing hoaxes or scientology. I think it was Buzz Aldrin who told the stalking hoaxer to “go fuck himself” – a reasonable response, which the hoaxer (of course) declared was proof enough of a hoax. The problem here is that deniers control the levers of American power. What should Buzz have done under those circumstances?
bruce wilder
There will always be skeptics of every kind. AGW denialism is at almost on the same level as moon landing hoaxes or scientology.
I am sure there is “AGW denialism” on the same level as “moon landing hoaxes”; your eagerness to dismiss metamars does not encourage me to believe you would be a good judge for assigning particular expressions or arguments to appropriate “levels” .
To what level do we assign the hyperbolic, “What part of turning Earth’s climate into Venus do you not understand?”
metamars
“So you’re going to root out this corruption by quoting the Big Lebowski?”
The Dude abides. Never underestimate his abilities.
different clue
The phrase “climate left” is a denialist meme.
Those who are too stupid to acknowledge the basic fact of man made global warming are too stupid to live.
Those who are too stupid to live have no right to exist. And do not deserve to survive.
Survival is a privilege, not a right. And life is a gift, not a reward. Those who have become mature enough adults to accept the fact of global warming and its attendant weather chaos and climate decay all around them . . . might begin reaching out to eachother to share actionable information about limited-surroundings-mitigation and preparation and resilient survivalizing.
If such people care about the human future, if there is even going to be one, then such people must come to understand that it is a Mortal Sin to share survival information with the global warming denialists who make such survivalizing preparations even necessary at all. Sharing survival information with such people is a Mortal Sin against Life and a Mortal Sin against Future.
Willy
What part of turning Earth’s climate into Venus do you not understand?
I never said that. At what particular expressions or arguments level do you believe deniers are at? I’ve already stated my case in this thread and in many previous discussions. Here’s a basic common sense angle:
I’ve known a few PhDs. While a few can be a bit “my way or the highway”, even those few have had enough ‘scientific method sense’ to test their theories first before putting them out there for all their peers to see. Climate scientists have already done all that for many years. The heavy lifting of skeptical testing has been done.
When deniers pick through the garbage cans of well-tested and fully-refuted theories, it isn’t skepticism anymore. It’s professional denialism. They’re either junk dealers or have some personal vested interest in big energy/industry, which to be honest, we all do. And as you’ve said, this is where the discussion should be.
There are only two common sense ways that all these climate scientists can together, be in it for the money:
1. They’re in cahoots with deniers, so they can all together, believers and deniers, maintain a high enough level of FUD so they all get to keep making a decent living circling round and round with their ‘life on earth danger!’ theories.
2. They’re in cahoots with green industrialists. I’m sure they’re out there, but all 97-99% of them? That would have to be proven.
Billikin
Mercy me! Has the reincarnation of Jonathan Edwards joined our midst?
different clue
( from Sinners In the Hands of an Angry Mother Earth) . . .
” The God of Selection is a Callous God, and Its first True Prophet was Darwin.”
” If Mama Corn ain’t happy, ain’t NOOO body happy.”
Hugh
Climate change is settled science. This does not mean it is complete. Each IPCC report and climate assessment improves and expands on its predecessor, (and their conclusions have been consistently direr). The same could be said of any scientific field and any scientific theory: genetics, evolutionary theory, relativity theory, quantum chromodynamics, etc.
Debate is an essential part of the scientific process. There can be no progress without questioning, but the debate needs to be based on the data. Mandos’ comment is inexplicable to me, just as metamars’ pseudo-science is completely expected.
Per wiki,
“In statistical mechanics, entropy is an extensive property of a thermodynamic system. It is closely related to the number Ω of microscopic configurations (known as microstates) that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system (such as its volume, pressure and temperature). Under the assumption that each microstate is equally probable, the entropy S is the natural logarithm of the number of microstates, multiplied by the Boltzmann constant kB. Formally (assuming equiprobable microstates),
S=kB x ln Ω”
or in other words, the greater the number of microstates, the greater the entropy; the fewer the microstates, the lower the entropy.
Re AOC and the Green New Deal, it is good to bring attention to the need to act, but her GND is still just a wishlist, not a coherent plan.
Hugh
BTW this article just came out with an interesting and disturbing idea:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degrees-to-global-warming-20190225/
While certainly not Venus level, it suggests that cloud thinning associated with higher levels of CO2 , 1200 ppm, would be one tipping point leading to significantly increased temps.
Dale
This whole discussion reminds me of the poem by Percy Shelley:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
So, keep arguing. The average global temperature continues to rise. The oceans become more acidic. The human population continues to grow while wildlife diminishes.
Before I started college, a wonderful biologist by the name of Barry Commoner came up with the following four laws:
Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
Everything must go somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.
Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system”
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. – Wikipedia
After almost 50 years, I still remember them. The science associated with your “global crisis” debate goes back even further. I go with the worldwide scientific consensus and suggest that time for debate is over.
bruce wilder
Hugh: Climate change is settled science.
This expression strikes me as an odd formula. What is a “settled science” ? Outside of a polemic against the straw man “denialists”, does it have application?
I think people generally struggle with trying to wrap their heads around the emerging outline of the implications of climate science. It isn’t just those being deplored for their alleged “denialism”.
Climate science, itself, is clearly burgeoning. There is a great deal of activity, both in developing new insights into possible dynamics and in ascertaining facts, both historical and from current monitoring.
The sheer volume of activity and the high proportion of researchers new to the field compound the difficulty of tracking what is crossing the threshold from speculation or suspicion to reasoned expert judgment of probable consequences based on verifiable knowledge of processes and magnitude. Science being a human activity in which the ambitious chase fame, there is great deal of clamoring for attention for speculative insights that might become colorable claims of priority in later recognition of the achievement of discovery. Journalism compounds the ensuing confusion by favoring the sensational, even where it must be fabricated from unjustified leaps of logic or misunderstanding.
Like it or not, climate science suffers credibility problems from the way journalism has exploited the science of nutrition and weight loss and the science of cancer, not to mention the sciences of psychology and sociology.
The IPCC are not doing science, per se. That is, they are not engaged in discovering or measuring. They are trying to digest the science into judgments and assessment useful to responsible policymakers.
In the context of what the IPCC is doing, “settled science” might be trying to distill an essential consensus about what is reasonably certain of expectation from the clamor of speculation and claims of significance that the actual science is producing in abundance.
I think one of the key understandings that needs to become widespread, but is hard to express and grasp is that despite the frenzy of speculation and the chaotic nature of weather (as distinct from climate), there is a core certain of knowledge that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans is increasing inexorably and there will be consequences, natural consequences. Because there will be natural consequences amplifying what man has done there is a serious danger of catastrophe playing out over hundreds of years, over the course of which man may have little power of control or remedy.
Saying that those people, the denialists, are the wilfully ignorant ones is a comforting self-flattery, but ultimately unhelpful.
Those of us who are alarmed and trying to understand the science and our responsibility in good will still do not know what to do and are not organized to do it. “The science” may be “settled” but it does not dictate a practical program. At best, we can come up with a wishlist like the Green New Deal.
nihil obstet
bruce wilder: Like it or not, climate science suffers credibility problems from the way journalism has exploited the science of nutrition and weight loss and the science of cancer, not to mention the sciences of psychology and sociology.
Actually, science suffers credibility problems from the way scientists have exploited the science of nutrition and weight loss and the science of cancer, not to mention the sciences of psychology and sociology. And drug development and effectiveness. And so on.
Authority generally has failed miserably. When a bunch of people with fancy titles and associations with elite universities and a long resume of serving on high level commissions, advisory boards, and the like, tell you that you have to suffer some diminution of life chances or else, you should be permitted to have more than a doubt or two. Think about how the economy was saved in 2008. And you know it was saved because people with fancy titles, association with elite universities, and a long resume of government economic service keep telling you so.
What’s interesting in the debate is that we do have the consensus based on strong evidence that there will be changes that affect at least a large segment of humanity. But we’re still exclusively working on the physical changes. There are huge social and economic questions that we’re ignoring. Our whole economic system is based on relative stability of the physical world. What happens when cities go underwater, farmland becomes desert and the like? I don’t see the current economic winners just accepting that now they’re losers. If we don’t figure out a viable way to organize and distribute resources in a world of change, we’re likely to end up with very violent attempts at dominance of the newly valuable resources.
Stirling S Newberry
1st grade is let out now.
Billikin
There was a time when scientists believed in settled science. That was before the discovery of special relativity and quantum dynamics. So much for science being settled!
Even so, science encodes a great deal of reliable knowledge. That means that we can make certain statements with confidence, we can make predictions and postdictions. As for global warming and climate change, the greenhouse effect is well known, and we can make predictions based upon the release of greenhouse gases. As we peer into the future, the error bands of those predictions are wide, and the predictions made 20 and 30 years ago, while within the margin of error, have been wrong. They have underestimated global warming. This should not give us any warm and fuzzy feelings. I would not say that climate science is settled, but it has made successful predictions within the margin of error.
bruce wilder
nihil obstet: . . .we’re still exclusively working on the physical changes. There are huge social and economic questions that we’re ignoring.
Yes.
The IPCC reports have been remarkably unbalanced and an important reason is that while climate science has been gaining remarkably in sophistication, mainstream economics is agnatology. The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C that came out in October seemed to express the frustration of climate scientists with the stubborn stupidity of neoliberal economists.
Really basic points that ought to be clearly understood such as the necessity of radical measures for energy conservation are completely overlooked by many politicians and media pundits. The importance of the chart Ian headed this post!!!
Billikin: This should not give us any warm and fuzzy feelings.
Indeed.
But, whether you choose to feel an appropriate degree of alarm for posterity is not the same as thinking thru supporting a collective response.
nihil obstet
bruce wilder, I’m concerned not just with the failure of economists and politicians to come up with ways to direct necessary actions for energy conservation and other means to reduce the change. I’m thinking about individual property. For the intense storms of the last several decades, we’ve used insurance and government aid to replace the losses of people affected by the hurricanes. But say I live along the Florida coast or in lower Manhattan, and my house and possessions are now permanently under water. There are tens of millions suffering the same thing. Insurance was no longer sold prior to the rise of water. Will we continue to try to come up with individual bailouts to each person suffering the loss? Where will I go, especially if there is insufficient infrastructure for enough houses, no jobs in the place where housing appears to be available. Next year, more people may be dispossessed.
I don’t think the individual bailout to each person, maintaining the almost exclusively private property model of living will work well enough for the society/economy to continue. It’s that economic model that I’m thinking of.
Hugh
IPCC reports are assessments based on an extensive review of a highly technical literature. The “I” in IPCC stands for “Intergovernmental.” This underlines a process problem in that panel members are appointed by their governments. They get no special funding for their IPCC work. The findings of the IPCC institutionally err on the conservative side. And the timing of reports has gotten longer over time. Reports appeared in 1990, five years later in 1995, six years later in 2001, six years again in 2007, seven years in 2014, and the next, the sixth, in 2022 eight years later. Special reports are a way to cover these lengthening gaps and focus attention in special areas. But it is important to understand, the fifth assessment which came out in 2014 is based on data from as far back as 2007, that is up to twelve years ago. IPCC assessments are out of date within one to two years of their publication. It is one of the reasons why there is pressure to overhaul the process, turning it into something more open-source and continually updated.
Billikin
@Bruce Wilder
The question of a collective response is what ultimately brought me here, starting with my question of 10 years ago. What does it look like for humans to be in energy balance with our environment? Ancient Egypt? Tokugawa Japan? Both hierarchical cultures. The Dark Ages? Not attractive. Medieval Italy with its city states and republics? They brought us the Renaissance, but were they in energy balance? I dunno.
As I said, I am hopeful. One thing I hope is that the natural catastrophes of recent years will wake people up.
bruce wilder
What does it look like for humans to be in energy balance with our environment?the
Having watch you shred entropy, I am afraid to even ask what you imagine “energy balance with [the] environment” ought to mean and why it would be desirable.
It sounds like a leap to what it all means neatly avoiding how it all works (or doesn’t).
Billikin
@ Bruce Wilder
Actually, the question is about what works. We know that what we are doing now does not work, and has the potential to lead to a runaway feedback loop that ends in some form of greenhouse planet, which may or may not support human life, which may or may not support civilization. Suppose that we succeed in stopping our overuse of fossil fuel. What is our picture of a good workable, sustainable society? It may be one with a much lower standard of living than that of present day Europe and other advance economies. If so, we need to admit that fact and figure out how we get there without too much pain in the process. Perhaps it means going back to a standard of living of early 20th century Britain. Not so bad, and probably doable without too much social disruption. Now man people in the US are understandably upset about the difficulties of maintaining a lifestyle of the 1970s. Rightly so, IMO, because they have been unfairly treated since that time. What happens if they are told that their children have to go back to the standard of living of 1900? Is anybody addressing such questions? We can’t say what works if we do not have a good picture of what is workable.
We do have a historically recent model for what is workable in an advanced, sustainable civilization with limited resources in Tokugawa Japan. Japan had almost entirely cut itself off from the rest of the world, and was self-sufficient. It was a caste society, which we would like to avoid. The nobility did not engage in commerce, and the samurai class was forbidden to do so. IIUC, it had a slow growth economy. There is a letter from a samurai family around 200 years into the Tokugawa Shogunate asking to be made commoners so that they could make a living. The Shogunate imposed a forestry policy to maintain its forests. Important to commerce was transportation. Commoners could not ordinarily travel, but goods did. The main route was the Tokaido, tuning east to west near the coast. The Shogunate forced the nobility to maintain that road. Not our view of the good life, but as a sustainable civilization it worked. I think that we can do better than Tokugawa Japan, but I also think that we have lessons to learn from it.
It is plain that we have to cease our reliance upon fossil fuels, and as soon as is feasible. We also have to develop and utilize renewable energy. We have to develop public transportation. But are such measures enough? Even if we avoid mass starvation, ecological dislocation, and wars, and achieve sustainable civilization around the world, what does that look like? How does it work? How do we get there, without a realistic picture of where we want to go?
bruce wilder
Indeed.
I actually think we need an effort on the same scale as global climate modeling to create simulation models of the global economy that explore in transparent and intuitively accessible detail the sources of economic productivity and prosperity, with the goal of constraining radically the waste.
Mainstream neoclassical economics does not have a good explanation of how the industrial revolution(s) worked: the so-called “experts” do not have much insight into what mattered: the contribution of fossil fuels, the contribution of scientific advance, the contribution of increased specialization and global scale; the contribution of unsustainable waste (for surely, many apparently highly productive expansions rested on a failure to renew and replace).
The capitalist model to date has been built on profligate waste and heedless expansion, and it will be necessary to constrain fairly radically, both population and energy use. And, to create an infrastructure that allows us to operate a highly productive economy within such constraints.
I suppose that that does mean going “backward” in certain respects, though the steampunk fetish of people like John Michael Greer or James Howard Kunstler is based on a profound misunderstanding of what is feasible.
The actual technologies of the early 19th century were, in fact, ridiculously inefficient and wasteful. The only thing that saved that world from imminent self-destruction — and it was a near thing, remember — was the relatively small size of the global human population — a billion, perhaps, in 1800. Vast areas of the planet remained very lightly populated. Still, rapidly industrializing Britain could not feed itself — nutritional standards for the working classes in the cities fell dramatically and famine killed off a million Irish. Tokugawa Japan, too, experienced periodic famines — a society that cannot reliably feed itself even with a cuisine as severely ascetic as Tokugawa Japan is not, imho, an attractive model.
The 21st century has far more productive and efficient technologies available: our wastefulness is, in an important sense, more voluntary. Think about LED technology for electric light: much cheaper to make and consumes much less electricity to produce a given quantity of lumens. But, instead of using that innovation to radically reduce our use of electric power for light, we are, if anything increasing it. The planet at night has become noticeably brighter when viewed from space in less than a decade! We do not need more light at night, but it has become cheaper and so, unconstrained, we consume more of it. Economists call it the Jevons Effect, named for the 19th century economist who first drew attention to the phenomenon of increasing efficiency leading to greater consumption. And, the Jevons Effect is now the mortal enemy of all humanity.
The call to switch the economy to “sustainable” energy technologies misses the mark in several ways. We really do need to constrain ALL energy use and build a infrastructure for an economy that needs much less energy to operate. And, in some respects, that may look a bit like going backward: transportation by rail in place of autos and airplanes. But, not a return to 19th century rail technology — duh! — rail is attractive, because the technologies of digital control can be applied so effectively to reduce radically the use of energy, while still allowing people and goods to travel great distances within reasonable time frames.
And, we need to act to constrain ourselves in our use of the planet. The movement to largely exclude humans from at least half the planet, in order to preserve the ecologies of the natural world as well as the capacity of the natural world to assimilate human waste, seems very sensible to me. Constraining human population is going to be very challenging.
On the other hand, the 21st economy in the advanced or developed world is so absurdly wasteful that artfully constraining its excess would be a welcome relief. Something like half the U.S. labor force is dedicated to salesmanship in one form or another, and much of that is selling things no one needs, or just hiking the price of things that could be very cheap if it were not “necessary” to finance the marketing. If we did not do this “work” no one need be worse off at the end of the day, as the effort to produce and deliver actual goods need not be reduced.
The cheapness of communication has been subject to a Jevons Effect, so that, as Ian points out occasionally, we are actually making ourselves miserable checking social media and our phones every ten seconds. Constraining that in some way could be a boon to human happiness. And, it is still true that modern communication technologies can substitute for a lot of travel — we probably do not need to commute to work so frequently.
The need for radical constraint is a long way from making it into the conventional wisdom, where economists, at least, are still chattering mindlessly about carbon pricing schemes. I do not know why people are so stupid.
Billikin
@ Bruce Wilder
Thanks. 🙂
It seems to me that sustainable energy usage means humans using some fraction of the energy the earth gets from the sun. Reliance on fossil fuel is living off the principal, as my mother would say. Not a good idea, even aside from pollution and global warming. And I agree that we need to constrain all our energy usage. Producing energy also produces waste and heat. And besides, we are not the only species on the planet!
metamars
Trump, the uber narcissist and political incompetent, may yet surprise me by putting his proposed “Presidential Committee on Climate Security”, headed by Dr. Happer, to good political use.
Trump definitely sees this through a political lens, and not just one of scientific controversy.
However, in spite of Trump’s rising poll numbers, I still view him as politically incompetent. Thus, my default expectation is that he would do basically nothing to educate the American public about the skeptical scientific position. Some tweets here and there, maybe a mention in occasional Presidential speeches, and of course some zingers and laugh lines at his rallies, which are replete with his adoring, uncritical fan base.
I welcome Trump to surprise me.
Two reasons that he might surprise me:
1) AOC, champion of the “Green New Deal”, who seems to get under the skin of Republicans and the Fox News crowd
2) The various children’s marches against climate change, which REALLY seems to get under the skin of some skeptics. See the various nasty comments, directed against children, here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/02/we-the-young-open-letter-from-the-student-climate-change-strikers/
I think a good part of the reason for the antipathies shown to AOC and the student strikers is that both represent a potentially large political threat. These are threats that people with political brains are looking to nurture and actualize. (See, e.g., https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/03/german-chancellor-backs-climate-change-student-strikes/ . Globalist Angela Merkel is supporting the student strikes.)
Now, Trump, with his podium, COULD have set about debunking CO2 catastrophism, by educating the public as to it’s gross deficiencies, distortions, and dishonesty. Ah, but Trump is Trump; and he is surrounded by people who look to sabotage his agenda. His political IQ is low,
his golf-centric work ethic is antithetical to political mastery, and some of his nearby enemies love to encourage him to be ineffective. From my perspective, he’s wasted half his Presidency wrt “climate change”. Anything he attains via executive fiat can be undone by his successor. The only way to make that politically unfeasible was to wake up the large majority of Americans. E.g., this intelligence squared debate managed to collapse support for CO2 catastrophism in the space of about an hour and a half: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-28qNd6ass
Tweeter-in-chief Trump has been too clueless to get that job done, but maybe, just maybe, somebody will whisper in his ear about what happens when the subject is treated more seriously.
Stay tuned!
different clue
Sleight-of-mouth bait-and-switcheroo shell-gaming works if no one notices “what you did there”.
What are the implications of a clever change-the-subject from global warming to global warming catastrophism?
Some questions arise.
How many more heat-stroke deaths per year would still be less-than-catastrophic?
How many more droughts per year, and how extensive, and how severe, would still be less than catastrophic?
How many more junk-rain water-bomb events would still be less than catastrophic?
How many tropical diseases could spread around how far and still be less than catastrophic?
How high could sea level rise and still be less than catastrophic?
and so forth . . .
metamars
@ different clue
You ask good questions, but your framing and innuendo is rejected. No serious scientist would ever ask if “climate change” is real, but rather how, exactly, does climate change, and what is causing these changes. In a hard science like physics, you want to make quantified statements with as much precision as circumstances allow.
(Similarly, no serious scientist would ask if the earth is rotating. A serious scientific question is what are the exact periods of rotation, and what causes the variations, and what are the effects. I won’t get into it, but the details related the earth’s rotation about it’s axis, as well as it’s orbit around the solar system’s center of mass, is probably highly related to some aspects of climate change.)
If anthropogenic climate change isn’t likely to be catastrophic, then there’s no political motivation to deal with climate change. For amoral and immoral political animals and Agenda 21 social engineering types, of course, there’s lots of motivation to lie about catastrophes, if, indeed, climate change short of apocalyptic asteroid strikes promises no catastrophes beyond historical norms for floods, droughts, etc.
Likewise, citizens seriously concerned about dire climate change predictions will lose interest to the degree that “dire” fades into “normal”.
Your questions mostly amount to “OK, so what constitutes a CATASTROPHIC climate change”. This is a fair question, though not one I care to get into. I’m not knowledgeable about the details of his work, but Lomborg has tried to quantify losses, as well as various attempts at CO2 remediation, taking as gospel various IPCC warming scenarios.
I interpret a cost/benefit approach as not only worthy, but required, to responsibly try and assess various public policy implications. Whether Lomborg’s analysis is a gold standard, or whether he’s way off, he’s at least pointed in the right direction.
In this vein, I recently heard an interesting interview by Ralph Nader of a dyed-in-the-wool CO2 catastrophist, Paul Hawken, who wants to completely erase anthropogenic global warming. He prioritized a list of most important actions (implying a cost/benefit analysis for each of his suggestions, which were then compared), and has declared that the most important issue to tackle is greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere from refrigerators and other coolers. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rYRqzW2bh4&t=3315s
While Hawken may be out to lunch in describing the IPCC reports as, IIRC, “impeccable”, he gives every indication of approaching his analysis and proposed remedies rationally, given his biases.
We could use more Lomborgs and Hawkens, and fewer smear merchants and grifters, who run from scientific challenges and rational debates the way vampires flee sunshine.