Earth +6°C fatal? - The warming up of the earth (Aug/03/2010 )
HomeBrew on Thu Aug 5 11:58:46 2010 said:
perneseblue on Thu Aug 5 05:27:54 2010 said:
The whole point of green technology and green movement in my mind is to buy time, decades, hopefully centuries of time. We can rebuild our seaports if sea level rise over the centuries, change our crops if we are given many decades. Even move whole population centers smoothly if we had enough time. But we can not adapt without major damage to civilization if the changes are happening too quickly. And that fast pace is what human aided global warming is now setting.
Yes, but the underlying assumption here is that mitigating human contribution to global warming will actually buy us extra decades or centuries to adapt society, which of course also assumes that the major cause of the warming is anthropogenic.
I would argue that it doesn't matter. Man-made or natural, global warming is a threat and has to be combated, with the objective to buy time for modern civilization to adapt. Contributions made by humanity to global warming is the only factor that humanity actually have any direct control over. And when faced with a problem but given only one tool, you use that tool even if it doesn't work that well.( And yes, sequestering CO2 is an idea... though I would prefer it to be done as carbon. Nasty things happened in the past when CO2 was released en masse.)
As I have stated earlier, I am fairly certain global warming is a natural event. The earth is warming as it leaves the last ice age and has been doing so for the past 50,000 years.. What is unnatural is the pace of the past 200 years. Humanity is acting as an accelerant to a global trend. And like any accelerant we are going to see big and fast changes to the system for very modest effort. The earth "want" to get warm. And as we all know, complex system tend not to react linearly with increasing input.
perneseblue on Sat Aug 7 05:43:51 2010 said:
I would argue that it doesn't matter. Man-made or natural, global warming is a threat and has to be combated, with the objective to buy time for modern civilization to adapt.
And I would argue that it does matter -- we have finite financial resources available. Is it more effective to spend those resources on green technology fixes, which will have little impact on the situation we find ourselves in if the warming is not in large part man-made, or is it better to realize that the warming is inevitable and that we have little influence over it, and thus spend our resources instead on making changes to societal infrastructure to migiagte the effects of living on a warmer planet?
HomeBrew on Sat Aug 7 14:43:57 2010 said:
perneseblue on Sat Aug 7 05:43:51 2010 said:
I would argue that it doesn't matter. Man-made or natural, global warming is a threat and has to be combated, with the objective to buy time for modern civilization to adapt.
And I would argue that it does matter -- we have finite financial resources available. Is it more effective to spend those resources on green technology fixes, which will have little impact on the situation we find ourselves in if the warming is not in large part man-made, or is it better to realize that the warming is inevitable and that we have little influence over it, and thus spend our resources instead on making changes to societal infrastructure to migiagte the effects of living on a warmer planet?
To summarize, we disagree on two point.
1-The degree that humanity plays in the this global warming trend.
2-How humanity should allocate our limited and finite resources.
Why are those two points of contention important? I have come to realize it is because they overlay a more basic question, "Do we have sufficient time to adapt our civilization or do we need to buy time."
If we have sufficient time to adapt our civilization, I agree, we should spend our finite resources adapting. If humanity does not have enough time, it would be logical to expend some resources buying time, so we can complete the adaption process.
I stand on the side of "We don't have enough time". People take a lot of time to get their act together. Humanity has to get through the recognition stage, the denial stage (I think we are here), the anger stage, the acceptance stage, the long planing stage and finally the implementation stage.
Knowing people's propensity to procrastinate and dash madly to meet dead lines, the same would probably happen during this challenge. And worryingly, we will only know when the deadline has arrived when our crops fail, our seaports flood and shortages of goods due to disruptions from single point failures in the global supply chain. And yes, I recognize not all system failures will hit at the same time. But I believe those short few years will not provide enough time to adapt. Nor would the warning signs be recognized as such.
I also stand on the side that "Humanity do make a significant impact to the global warming trend."
Thus humanity can "buy" time to adapt by moving to green technology which has reduced emission of carbon dioxide. However I was thinking a step more than that. I was thinking of actual expenditure of resource/energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (my preference is to carbonize wood and storage of the charcoal produced underground). And yes, the dreadful solar shield idea with sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere would come under the idea of "buying time". Dreadful because knowing human behaviour, once the solar shield is up, people will stop bothering and make no attempt to adapt civilization. And when the shield goes down, we will get hit with all the changes in an instant, without even the few decades to adapt that we would receive with this warming trend.
I understand your position, and you've presented it well. I'm still a bit skeptical on the degree to which humans are responsible for the undeniable warming trend we're seeing. Two facts bother me -- one, that other planets in our solar system (without, presumably, SUVs) are also experiencing warming, and two, that current climate models don't accurately predict the climate today, given accurate data about the past. While there may be an "inconvenient truth" going on in all this somewhere, there are also a few "inconvenient facts" that don't fit and I, as a scientist (though admittedly not a climatologist), have found ignoring any inconsistencies to be a perilous proposition in hypothesis formation.
Thanks. I appreciate the complement. I understand your position for calling caution to making hasty decisions. The situation here is complicated. There are "inconvenient facts" that do not fit our models and worst yet there are “inconvenient truths” that we do not want to face.
As scientist, we want to have a good understand of a situation before making a decision and starting a course of action. Whether by experience or personality, we do not like to ignore dangling observations/facts that do not fit the model. These kinds observations tend to come back to bite wet bench experimenters, and often are the starting points to new and interesting things.
Yet, we must remember not all facts piece together in an easy and apparent manner. Sometimes the logic/mechanism behind an observation can be a little subtle, much like the recent understanding of how weak magnetic fields are able to shield against solar radiation, a feat that at first glance should not be possible and was deemed as such in the 1960s
In the global warming debate, I believe, mixed somewhere is this concern. If we do not take the time to build a working coherent model of climate change, we risk taking actions which at best are a waste of time and resources, and at worst could bring destruction to our civilization. However, if we take too much time, events will overtaking us and circumstance will force decisions on us.
How much time do we have? That too is another facet of the global warming debate.
perneseblue on Sat Aug 7 18:15:27 2010 said:
2-How humanity should allocate our limited and finite resources.
I do not think we have finite resources to address this situation. Recession/ No recession, money is made and we can spend as much as we want to work on a solution towards this problem (if we accept that it is a problem and want to act)
We definitely have to buy-time and change the attitude of people. We need to encourage people to reduce wastes and recycle more. I don't quite know how wise it is to pump CO2 underground.
But yes, we should inculcate "greener" habits and educate others around us, especially the elder generation along with the younger one to mitigate the effects of our day-today activities....
Debate is probably the right word. Stoichiometry of emissions says the green chemistry and related efforts are insufficient to address emissions so as to prevent such dire predictions if they were indeed to take place. It is important to note the some of Gore's fellow Nobel recipients objected to the dire predictions he anticipated - noting he'd been proven wrong too many times to make such projections on current models.