Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[Furcifer]

A statement of faith for which you can give no evidence.

Nonsense. The technology already exists to go carbon neutral. Likewise the technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere already exists. We just have other things we'd rather spend our money and time on. That's fact, not faith.

 

[Furcifer]

There is nothing "easy" to accomplish with respect to climate change issues. As to prioritization, as I stated, it is a societal and political issue that I am not sure that our species is clever or wise enough to overcome.

We've got 100 years to implement the current technology and go carbon neutral. We're going carbon neutral and most people won't even realize it. That's easy.
The species is clever enough, at least collectively, to not be fooled into paying more for something that isn't necessary. That's where we're at right now and that's why the public isn't buying AGW hysteria from alarmists.

 

[BenBurch]

I think most people know that. How would science make that happen?

Hundreds of 1000 MW nuclear power stations.

Tens of thousands of Windmills and Solar installation.

A few dozen huge chemical plants that synthesize liquid fuel from water, atmospheric CO2, and electricity.

 

[BenBurch]

Nonsense. The technology already exists to go carbon neutral. Likewise the technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere already exists. We just have other things we'd rather spend our money and time on. That's fact, not faith.

You clearly have no concept of the amount of energy required to capture and sequester atmospheric CO2.

 

[lomiller]

The species is clever enough, at least collectively, to not be fooled into paying more for something that isn't necessary.

You seem to be promoting the position that voluntary payment will suffice to pay for a public good. You should be aware that your position is strongly refuted by all respectable economist.

That's where we're at right now and that's why the public isn't buying AGW hysteria from alarmists.

When you denounce the entire scientific community as wrong you need to little more backing up your position than blind assertions that scientists are really just alarmists and science is just hysteria.

 

[lomiller]

You clearly have no concept of the amount of energy required to capture and sequester atmospheric CO2.

The bigger problem is really the lack of a pricing mechanism. Releasing carbon is free for an individual while all the costs are socialized. Conversely the benefits of sequestering CO2 are all socialized while the costs are born individually. Both situations strongly encourage releasing CO2 even when increasing atmospheric CO2 is strongly against everyone’s interest.

Both represent a market failure but many people follow political ideologies that consider the free market an infallible deity that would never allow such market failures to occur.

 

[Reality Check]

We've got 100 years to implement the current technology and go carbon neutral.

A few things wrong with this comment.
Firstly you have the timescale wrong. We have a few decades to go carbon neutral. You may be thinking of the fact that many climate change projections stop at 2100. There are many predictions of large effects by 2050, e.g. sea level changes. See IPCC Projected climate change and its impacts for a regional breakdown of these effects expected by 2050.

Secondly you are forgetting that going carbon neutral will just stop human emissions from being added to the atmosphere. The existing added CO2 will still be there. We will be faced with the added expense of coping with the added effects of the extra decades of emissions.

Thirdly you seem to be assuming that going carbon neutral will stop global warming immediately. This is incorrect. It will take time for the atmosphere to come to equilibrium. Climate time lag

Hansen 2005 estimates the climate lag time is between 25 to 50 years.

Fourthly you have forgotten about the more extreme possibilities that these few decades of warming could bring about, e.g. the melting of the Arctic permafrost leading to a large release of methane (see New observations find underwater Arctic Shelf is perforated and venting methane) or a catastrophic collapse of the Greenland icecap leading to changes in the Gulf Stream.

The consensus seems to be that we should go carbon neutral as soon as practicable so that we can avoid the extra costs of the effects of delay. Luckily it looks like schemes such a carbon pricing actually generate income and jobs (at least in the USA): A Real-World Example of Carbon Pricing Benefits Outweighing Costs.

 

[Reality Check]

That's where we're at right now and that's why the public isn't buying AGW hysteria from alarmists.

Forgot about this bit of your post.
The public should not be buying the AGW hysteria from alarmists.
The public should not be buying the AGW hysteria from deniers.

What the public should be looking at is the AGW evidence as presented and supported by the scientific community.
The problem is that alarmists and deniers scream and whine loudly in their hysteria and thus tend to be reported. So the public is buying AGW hysteria from alarmists and deniers. The real question is how much are they buying into the product of these alarmist and denier whiners? Maybe a topic for another thread though.

A minor point - you need to be a bit clearer in your posts. Since the public should be listening to the scientific community, your 'AGW hysteria from alarmists' implies that it is the scientific community that is the alarmists (as lomiller pointed out).

 

[Furcifer]

You clearly have no concept of the amount of energy required to capture and sequester atmospheric CO2.

Then you have no idea how much energy there is in sunlight and the wind. There's more than enough to remove the carbon in a relatively short amount of time using passive technologies that harness UV rays and the wind to filter CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The energy and the technology are there, it's simply a matter of money and the will to do so.

 

[Furcifer]

You seem to be promoting the position that voluntary payment will suffice to pay for a public good. You should be aware that your position is strongly refuted by all respectable economist.

No, that's why we have government.

When you denounce the entire scientific community as wrong you need to little more backing up your position than blind assertions that scientists are really just alarmists and science is just hysteria.

Nobody is denouncing the entire scientific community. These are just lies being perpetuated by alarmists. That's what extremist groups do, they lie and exaggerate.
Of course you may be privy to information I'm not aware of. Who is denouncing the entire scientific community? Some sort of religious fanatic group?

 

[Trakar]

I think most people know that. How would science make that happen?

Science merely provides the understandings, it is up to economists, politicians and ultimately the people to make use of these understandings and apply the proper effort required to achieve problem resolution,...one way or the other.

 

[Furcifer]

A few things wrong with this comment.
Firstly you have the timescale wrong. We have a few decades to go carbon neutral.

Nonsense. We have all the time we want to go carbon neutral. I said 100 years because it's a nice round number that's familiar and easily understood.

Secondly you are forgetting that going carbon neutral will just stop human emissions from being added to the atmosphere. The existing added CO2 will still be there. We will be faced with the added expense of coping with the added effects of the extra decades of emissions.

I'm forgetting nothing. By the time we go carbon neutral the world will have well adapted to climate change. Returning to pre-industrial levels will be an additional cost that's unlikely to be undertaken.

Thirdly you seem to be assuming that going carbon neutral will stop global warming immediately. This is incorrect. It will take time for the atmosphere to come to equilibrium.[/URL]

Like I said, by the time the World is carbon neutral we will be well adapted to the new climate and no one will care. I'm sure there will be a movement of Climate Restoration fanatics, but in 100 years they will look just as foolish as Warmers do today.

Luckily it looks like schemes such a carbon pricing actually generate income and jobs (at least in the USA):

Schemes indeed.

 

[Trakar]

Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of

"Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change"

1 Introduction
I believe that the most striking feature of the economics of climate change is that its extreme
downside is non-negligible. Deep structural uncertainty about the unknown unknowns of
what might go very wrong is coupled with essentially unlimited downside liability on possible
planetary damages. This is a recipe for producing what are called “fat tails”in the extremes
of critical probability distributions. There is a race being run in the extreme tail between
how rapidly probabilities are declining relative to how rapidly damages are increasing. Who
wins this race, and by how much, depends on how fat (with probability mass) the extreme
tails are. It is di¢ cult to judge how fat the tail of ruinous climate change might be because
it represents events that are very far outside the realm of ordinary experience...

Full paper at: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/61_REEP2011%20fat-tail.pdf

 

[BenBurch]

Then you have no idea how much energy there is in sunlight and the wind. There's more than enough to remove the carbon in a relatively short amount of time using passive technologies that harness UV rays and the wind to filter CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The energy and the technology are there, it's simply a matter of money and the will to do so.

Yes I do. Pretty much exactly. I was writing papers on solar energy and wind energy back in the 1970s.

It is actually totally infeasible to do what you suggest without a major investment you will never convince a Republican to back.

You would need to expend about 5X the energy we have got from fossil fuels to re-capture that CO2 from the atmosphere.

Now, just think about that for a second.

Every wheel that has turned, every house that was warmed, every light that has burned since the 1700s. Five times that.

Not bloody possible.

Where we can and SHOULD be extracting CO2 is where we produce liquid nitrogen. We get that by fractional distillation of liquified air, and as you liquify air you have the opportunity to process the fraction that is left when the Nitrogen has been boiled off which contains CO2. Since we spend almost all the energy involved already, we should not waste that.

However that is less than 0.1% of the CO2 we add if we captured all of it, and getting there adds CO2 to the atmosphere in a larger quantity than we capture.

 

[lomiller]

No, that's why we have government.

Which only means anything if government takes action to deal with CO2 but at the risk of repeating myself you seem to be taking the position that no government action should be taken.

Nobody is denouncing the entire scientific community. These are just lies being perpetuated by alarmists. That's what extremist groups do, they lie and exaggerate.

The scientific community actively researching the subject overwhelmingly agrees that human CO2 is warming the plant at a pace only seen in massive changes like the ones that occur at the end of a glaciations. Since you repeatedly claim this is only “alarmists spreading hysteria” we can only conclude that you think the scientists doing the publishing are the “alarmists”.

Of course you may be privy to information I'm not aware of. Who is denouncing the entire scientific community? Some sort of religious fanatic group?

Per the above, you are denouncing the entire scientific community when you dismiss their conclusions as “hysteria spread by alarmists”.

 

[Trakar]

...Nobody is denouncing the entire scientific community. These are just lies being perpetuated by alarmists. That's what extremist groups do, they lie and exaggerate.
Of course you may be privy to information I'm not aware of. Who is denouncing the entire scientific community? Some sort of religious fanatic group?

That's the first time I've heard anyone in this thread seriously claim that the the majority of the American Republican party was a "religious fanatic group," but I guess I understand the conflation with regards to their position on the AGW issue,...and evolution,...and non-discrimination based on sexual orientation,...perhaps you have a point!?

Regardless, so long as you accept the mainstream scientific understandings of climate change as expressed and propounded by the statements of the national and global mainstream climate science organizations and field leaders, then you understand and accept the difficulties ahead.

The most "easy" solutions involve the entire planet going carbon neutral by 2020 and bringing atmospheric ghgs CO₂-e back down to ~350ppm by 2050. There are other options, but the longer it takes to achieve these 2 primary conditions (carbon neutrality and atmospheric concentrations equivilant to 350ppm) the more expensive and difficult the problems become, due to both direct effects, impacts and the chance that we push some already teetering tipping point feedback systems into full engagement. If that happens it will be extremely difficult for our species to survive, yet alone our civilization. This is not alarmism, merely alarm and concern over the actual facts, according to the best current mainstream understandings.

"Climate Change"
http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/collections.cfm?collect=9

"Costs of adapting to climate change significantly under-estimated"
http://www.iied.org/climate-change/...-climate-change-significantly-under-estimated

"Early warning of climate tipping points"
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n4/full/nclimate1143.html

"The Copenhagen Diagnosis"
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_LOW.pdf

"Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change"
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1105/1105.0968.pdf

"Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model"
http://quercus.igpp.ucla.edu/teaching/papers_to_read/cox_etal_nat_00.pdf

"Increasing impacts of climate change upon ecosystems with increasing global mean temperature rise"
http://www.sysecol2.ethz.ch/pdfs/Wa152.pdf

"The Climate Crisis: An introductory guide to climate change"
Review - http://acacia.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/ArcherRahmsdorf_Eos11_Mockup.pdf

 

[lomiller]

By the time we go carbon neutral the world will have well adapted to climate change. Returning to pre-industrial levels will be an additional cost that's unlikely to be undertaken.

Like I said, by the time the World is carbon neutral we will be well adapted to the new climate and no one will care.

Please support this claim

 

[Furcifer]

Which only means anything if government takes action to deal with CO2 but at the risk of repeating myself you seem to be taking the position that no government action should be taken.

This isn't 1950. The World governments meet on a regular basis to recommend action, and then implement that action. The actual number of actions "government" has taken around the World is too numerous to list on this website.
This is what alarmists do to maintain their alarmism, they wear blinders to what's actually going on in order to maintain their fantasy.
What's actually closer to the truth of my "position" is that too much action is being taken. So it's the opposite of what you think it seems.

The scientific community actively researching the subject overwhelmingly agrees that human CO2 is warming the plant at a pace only seen in massive changes like the ones that occur at the end of a glaciations. Since you repeatedly claim this is only “alarmists spreading hysteria” we can only conclude that you think the scientists doing the publishing are the “alarmists”.

There go the goal posts. First you said "the entire scientific community" now "scientific community actively researching the subject".

You went from 100% of scientists to perhaps 1% of scientists. Pure hyperbole as usual.

Per the above, you are denouncing the entire scientific community when you dismiss their conclusions as “hysteria spread by alarmists”.

And now is a good time to point out why the general public doesn't "believe" in Global Warming. The lies coming from alarmists. Someone hears "the entire scientific community..." then asks someone about it only to find out "no not the entire scientific community, just the ones getting paid to do climate research". What does that translate to in the general public? People lying in order to get more money.

The alarmists and their lies and misrepresentation do more to hinder progress on climate change than Exxon and all the oil companies in the World.

 

[Furcifer]

You would need to expend about 5X the energy we have got from fossil fuels to re-capture that CO2 from the atmosphere.

Not with passive CO2 sequestration. There's no expenditure.

Now, just think about that for a second.

Every wheel that has turned, every house that was warmed, every light that has burned since the 1700s. Five times that.

Not bloody possible.

Nonsense. To put this into perspective, an estimated 700000 terawatt hours of energy in the form of sunlight falls on the deserts of North Africa, Europe uses 4000 terawatt hours per year.

That's right, they consume about one half of 1%. And that's just solar.


It's not even a matter of energy, it's a matter of how fast do we want to do this and how long do we want to put up with the inconvenience.

 

[Reality Check]

Nonsense. We have all the time we want to go carbon neutral. I said 100 years because it's a nice round number that's familiar and easily understood.
[/quote
Nonsense. We have only that amount of time that Nature allows before the cost of global warming is too big (or if you really want 'alarmist' unable to be stopped).
If you wanted a round number then why not 200 years or a 1000?

I'm forgetting nothing. By the time we go carbon neutral the world will have well adapted to climate change. Returning to pre-industrial levels will be an additional cost that's unlikely to be undertaken.

The point is not the adaption. It is the cost in money and lives to adapt that is the point.
That means that we have to go carbon neutral as soon as practicable to stop the increase in CO2 and and minimize the cost in money and lives. Returning to a 1980's level of CO2 (not pre-industral in your alarmist suggestion above) would be good. Like you however I suspect that having spent all that money adapting to the new conditions, there will be no incentive to reduce CO2 and have to adapt again.

Schemes indeed.

And yes, carbon pricing schemes:

• are schemes!
• actually generate income and jobs in real life (at least in the USA): A Real-World Example of Carbon Pricing Benefits Outweighing Costs.