Hello,
I dont think i could have said it any better myself. That's why we can not allow the money argument. I dont like it either, but if both are making money, then the argument about money cancels out, yet you keep bringing it up to support your view of no man made warming.
I believe the prudence argument trumps unless you can prove that trying to enforce a change actually makes warming speed up, and i dont think anyone believes that.
True prudence must factor costs and all other relevant considerations.Prudence trumps nothing if its costs are prohibitive.
There is more than one question implied here. There are probably many, but there are two key questions in my mind. I think both questions are hard. Perhaps you can claim that one question is not hard, but I don't think you can claim that both questions are are not hard to answer.
The first question is whether the present level of CO2 increase, which is clearly caused by recent human activity, is impacting the climate now. I think this is a hard question, even though many people think they know the answer and think the question is easy. I can find people on both sides of this issue that feel the question is easy and think they know the answer. Just this fact alone proves it's a hard question. But, really I have no right to argue with you if you say it's an easy question, or if you say it's not a hard one, because I have not devoted the time (and it is a great amount of time required, in my opinion) to understand all existing data and research on this subject. I do research in my own field of study and this takes most of my time.
The second question is whether a continual increasing of the CO2 level (which is clearly going to be caused by human activity) will eventually (in the future) cause a serious problem and maybe an irreversible catastrophic problem. You can't possibly know the answer to this and you can't possibly call this an easy question and I would dismiss anyone with that opinion as completely unreasonable. Well, there is one sense that this could be viewed as an easy question. If we just keep on dumping CO2 in the environment and we wait hundreds of years, then we will know the answer. But, that's the dumb guy's way of making a hard question easy.
If you dismiss this second question, then you reveal your complete ignorance about the difficulties in modeling climate and being sure that you have factored all processes into the calculations. You are showing that you don't understand nonlinear dynamics very well because you don't realize that some nonlinear systems can have critical parameter sensitivities, and small changes can completely alter the character of the system. There can be counterintuitive effects that make changes go backward from what common sense would say, and there can be runaway effects if positive feedback loops are triggered by a critical small change.
I said that money is the reason why there is even an argument, not that it proves one argument is correct or not. Nothing is cancelled out, because money does not address whether man-made global warming is valid or not. I bring money up to validate my claim that those who should know better advance their view of blame in the face of contradictory evidence.
Prudence trumps nothing if its costs are prohibitive.
Ratch
Wow, either this makes no sense at all or my brain is frozen today (cold in this area outside today).
You can not bring up money if money does not address the issue, as you stated yourself.
If you have a function like f(a,b,c,m) then clearly the function depends on 'm', but if you have a function f(a,b,c) then clearly the function does not depend on 'm', so you can not say that 'm' is important to the function, in any way, shape, or form. You shouldnt bring up 'm' because it has nothing to do with this new function, and it's just doesnt make sense to talk about 'm' in any way. Also, it sure sounds like you are using money to support your claim of no warming due to man because of the way you worded your previous posts. If you claim that there is spending to support carbon control and that is one of the money problems, then you must be trying to support non carbon control.
I think what you are trying to say here is that money is the reason for the argument in the first place, and if it was not for money then there would be no reason to think there was man made global warming. But if the money goes for both sides, then where is no way we could determine who is right or who is wrong from that information alone. If i got 100 dollars and you got 100 dollars we cant tell why either party got the money unless we solve the primary issue first, which is whether or not there is really global warming. So money cancels there as well.
What costs? Apparently the costs are not prohibitive, they are just not comfortable. You heat your house in the winter because it is uncomfortable. If you didnt do that you'd use lots of blankets or something. If the cost for heating was prohibitive, it would not be a question of whether you wanted to or not, you could not do it. If the cost is simply uncomfortable, you still pay for it, although you dont like the cost.
Having contempt for doing something is not the same as not being allowed to do it at all.
What Steve is talking about is the positive feedback mechanism that can kick in, or even just having the system go to an uncontrollable state. For example, the predator prey model where we have a population of foxes and rabbits. If the foxes eat the rabbits too fast, the rabbits dont have time to produce new offspring to feed the foxes, so the rabbits die and the foxes are left with nothing to eat so they die too. If the foxes ration their meals (if they could of course) then they would go on to live much longer.
The main point here however not that the foxes die it's that their death can be predicted long before all the rabbits disappear using the model. Once the rabbits and foxes reach a certain state, even though there are still plenty of them around, their death both rabbits and foxes, can not be prevented.
In a more advanced model the foxes might be able to modify their behavior, but only to a certain extent. If they do it soon enough they can prevent the rabbits deaths. If they wait too long, their control power becomes too low to change the outcome.
I've been aware of that one for a long time. It is very unlikely we are near a period of reversal of the poles, but yes it is always possible. I don't worry about these things because it's nature and we can't control it. If it does happen we will deal with it as best we can. A large asteroid or comet collision with earth is another one, but that is one that we might be able to do something about proactively. With time, effort and money directed towards identifying and tracking any potential "planet killers", we can know beforehand, and the sooner we know, the more likely it is that we can provide a man-made small nudge to veer the object to another trajectory that misses the earth. Again, prudence is the driving force and a full analysis reveals the proper action we humans should take.I already sent steveB a link about something that could be more important to worry about.
There are at least 100 times more scientists that agree that global warming is at least partly due to man's activities ...
Again you bring up money when it has already been established (by Steve) that there are money issues on both sides, so that should level the argument to a draw (no win either side).
Let's see, government funded research or private sector research ... it is NOT a draw. Government has the power to tax and they think their funds are limitless.
My argument about prudence is not based on this kind of data.Prudence would be NOT stating a change in 0.X C is "global warming" when you have a miniscule of probes that have a tolerance of less than 1C. You would not accept 1000 readings using 921 meters whose tolerance exceeds the tolerance of the reading.
Hello again,
Ratch:
Im sorry but you dont seem to understand the idea of creating a simple hypothetical situation as a thought experiment so we can better understand the more complex issues. You dont seem to know how to stay "inside the box" when you are supposed to. Yes it is great to think "outside the box" but when we create scenarios with limited choices it is because we are limited in choices with the original issue too.
For the fox and rabbits illustration, you clearly jumped outside the box.
For another example, if we are given a choice between two 'colors' of paint to paint someones house, either white or black, you would probably choose 'grey', even when it is clear from the start that we could only use black or white. Or you'd come up with some other color for some other reason which you would like to invent, such as, "The sky is blue so lets paint it blue"
When we design these kinds of questions and scenarios we do it to illustrate a point about the main issue. I dont know why you cant follow this logic. You insist on changing the whole question/scenario to try to illustrate your own point and miss the entire point of the question.
The foxes can not find anything else to eat, period. That's because it is a closed system and that should have been obvious from the context. We are stuck with certain behaviors and have to deal with that, and that helps us understand something far greater.
So it looks like you cant understand that the foxes die at a certain point.
It also looks like you cant understand why we have to cancel money completely out of the picture.
I dont know what else to tell you, im sorry.
I am very happy though that you do not have control over how this plays out in real life, and i guess you are happy that i dont have that kind of control either
We have to put up with whatever the governments decide to do about all this.
Bill Gates is pushing a one-world-government with the hopes of dealing with issues like this that affect all of humanity. Whether or not that is a good idea is another subject for debate
And the flip side is that you could be wrong and CO2 increase will cause runaway climate issues. The bad way this can go is very very bad. Even if the chance were less than 1 in a 1000, some effort has to be made to do the science. And there is a lot of information that indicates the odds are higher than that, if odds even make any sense here.
I would have thought that reasonable people would only disagree on the exact amount of money which should be directed at this, not whether or not any money should be directed at this.
This objection is riddled with issues.And what, pray tell me, are we going to do about it? Even if we reduced our CO2 infusion to zero, we could still get a heating surge. It has happened before in the past. No amount of money is going to change that.
Ratch
I would have thought that reasonable people would only disagree on the exact amount of money which should be directed at this, not whether or not any money should be directed at this.
And what, pray tell me, are we going to do about it? Even if we reduced our CO2 infusion to zero, we could still get a heating surge. It has happened before in the past. No amount of money is going to change that.
Ratch
Steve,
One day science will have all the answers for "today's problems." Unfortunately, today's remedies become tomorrows problem, and science still will get funding to solve "those" problems. It's a never ending cycle.
One can not predict the future, as they can only infer what the future holds. This is especially true in climate studies, as the climate is cyclic. Look at the predictions of the earth cooling which became global warming, which is now "climate." Is there a cause and effect? I don't mean a controlled experiment, but one on a global scale? The "climate" ... please keep me funded crowd ... haven't been too accurate on their predictions so far. The margin of error is too great.
The methane gas scare, where the government wanted to, and probably did, fund a study for a scientist to collect cattle flatulence.
The Environmental Impact Studies that had people spending more money to pick up dead birds that hit a tall tower or it's guy wires. Then having to "freeze" the birds as evidence for future studies.
The end metric has not been realized. Of course, if you want it on a global scale, there will be a "one world government." That might happen is a few hundred years, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Daniel Huff wrote a book titled "How to lie with statistics."
This objection is riddled with issues.
You imply, in your first sentence, that man is impotent. He can cause problems, but he can not find solutions to those problems. I hope you are wrong about that.
The second sentence, tries to reduce the potential for a catastrophic problem to a mere "heating surge". This winter is damned cold and I would not mind a heating surge in a New England winter. The potential problem is a runaway green-house effect, caused by a positive feedback loop, not a heating surge.
The third sentence implies that the past changes means that changes now cant hurt us, or are not in any way undesirable. The earth has gone through huge changes and many of those changes man would have not survived had he been around then. When man was around, he has survived many earth-wide changes including caldera eras and ice ages. We struggled greatly in those times. Humans are thriving now, but there is no certainty that will always be the case. The earth will be just fine and it can tolerate huge changes without problem. Humans and any one species is far less resilient than the earth itself. And human economy and present ways of life are even less resilient that human kind itself.
Your last sentence is a statement without proof. Why can't money change it? Money is a measure of human effort. Money implies many humans banding together to target a specific problem. History has shown that if people decide something is important and group together with hard work and positive attitude, they can do amazing things. Those that do amazing things have more hope than you show in your response here.
To answer your question, what we would do depends on how bad the consequences would be. Let's say (hypothetically) we eventually discover that a threshold of 2 times present level of carbon will trigger a runaway effect with unacceptable consequences. Would you recommend a change in what we do, based on that? Or, do you say, no amount of money can change that. It seems to me we would slow the rate as much as possible, and develop alternate technologies. We would want to do it in a way that preserves the economy and maintains our lifestyles, but allows the tragedy to be avoided. If there is enough time, then this may be done. Just like the case of planet-killing-asteroids, the sooner you know, the sooner you can act and the better the chances of success.
Perhaps the research could uncover that we are screwed. Maybe it's too late to avoid a problem. If we stop our activity fast enough to prevent a climate catastrophe, then we collapse the economy. If we dont try to stop then the climate goes wild and our economy collapses for other reasons.
We dont really know. But, "dont know" should not imply " dont try" because humans are built to try and never quit.
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