America : Good while it lasted

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Originally posted by Xywalan
In essence, since GW's definite consequences are mostly negative...

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That's an opinion. Presumably, the only dire consequence GW is creating is the rise in sea level which will erase many coastal cities. That's mostly an economic problem, but it will cause bigger problem for small coastal countries. Really nothing that can't be solved if the world wants to.

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Second, many of the potential consequences of GW are hard to measure in economic terms. The extinction of species is one of them. Already many species are living on the edge of extinctions and their habitats are geographically limited to narrow regions. GW with high probability will make many of them extinct.

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That has to be one of the worst arguments I've ever heard in these forums. Sure, some species will go extinct (as happens to 25 different species every day), but you'll have many new species around. Cold blooded creatures and sea-creatures (including corals and the like) will flourish. Who is to say mammals such as polar bears are more important than the crocodiles?

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Originally posted by Jidoe
That's an opinion. Presumably, the only dire consequence GW is creating is the rise in sea level which will erase many coastal cities. That's mostly an economic problem, but it will cause bigger problem for small coastal countries. Really nothing that can't be solved if the world wants to.

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It will endanger many people who live at those coastal cities. That is not an economic problem. Consider Maldive: it consists of roughly thousand islets with an average height of 1.5 meters (4 feet 11 inch) and the highest point of 2.3 meters.

To be honest, I found it really astonishing that some can easily sit back in their armchairs and wave their hands around the danger and inconvenience that threatens many people just because they don't want their companies to pay some taxes. Specially, since we know the given growth numbers are unsustainable and they must be stopped at some point.

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Originally posted by Jidoe
That has to be one of the worst arguments I've ever heard in these forums. Sure, some species will go extinct (as happens to 25 different species every day), but you'll have many new species around. Cold blooded creatures and sea-creatures (including corals and the like) will flourish. Who is to say mammals such as polar bears are more important than the crocodiles?

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You still don't dispute my argument that such losses are difficult to measure in economic terms. Furthermore, maybe you don't care about the diversity of life on earth, the environment or even the lives of other people. Maybe you think caring about penguins is stupid. But still you don't dispute that my point is valid: many species will be lost because of GW. For some that is a reason to do something. For you apparently it is not. So you don't really have a factual disagreement with me. It's just that your value judgment is different.

Originally posted by Xywalan
@Gaviani
First, effects of global warming are one of the active areas of research because it's something that we do not understand to a sufficient degree.

If this is the case, why do you endorse policy proposals (or research statements embracing policy proposals) which impose massive (measured in multiple trillions of dollars) of costs in order to affect something we admittedly have limited information upon?

Science and policy share an underlying rule here I think you're blithely ignoring: big claims (or proposals) require big proof. Many GW policy advocates lack that.

Of course, some effects will definitely happen. For instance, sea levels will rise because of both the thermal expansion of water, as well as melting ice caps. Other effects are not easily understood. For example, oceans have a HUGE thermal capacity for absorbing extra heat. That thermal capacity will save us in the near future but that also means once warmed the oceans will continue to be warmer for a much longer time (beyond one century and currently I believe there is very little research on long term consequences of that change).

This is really interesting. I'd like to know what this actually means in a meaningful projection - some kind of demonstrable scientific projections as to long-term effects, etc.

In essence, since GW's definite consequences are mostly negative, even though it might have positive effects somewhere (such as expansion of agriculture in Canada) the logical action is to stop this global change.

Then you follow up your statement of admitted lack of knowledge (see two statements above) and your statement as to the ambiguity of consequences and even how there's little research into consequences with a definitive statement of "definite consequences" that are "mostly negative" as well as a reflexive policy proposal? Do you not see how this fails to satisfy even the most casual examination? You can't say essentially this:

"X is probably happening. However, there's very little research into Y effects of phenomenon X. That having been said, Y effects are probably mostly bad based on admittedly little research, and so we need to take drastic action to stop X because of Y."

Because that's essentially unpersuasive.

If something goes wrong we obviously have no place to run.

This is a truism that applies to literally every worldwide phenomenon. If you take national sovereignty seriously, it actually applies to every nationwide phenomenon too.

As I said before somewhere, feedback mechanisms are not known completely. It might be the case that a small warming might cause a chain of reactions that will result in a much larger warming. Again, this is probably very unlikely but the whole point is we really have no clue how likely it is and given the global nature of the change, the logical reaction is to try and not risk it.

No, the "logical reaction" to an unknown phenomenon - again, back to basic economics - isn't to reflexively attempt to avoid it. This is what we call an "expected value" calculation. Imagine a given situation X with potential outcomes X1, X2, X3, X4, and X5. The "expected value" of X is simply the probability of each outcome (X1 to 5) times its value (positive or negative) added together. Therefore, the "logical reaction" is actually to attempt to estimate the expected value of global warming (positive, negative, and inbetween), to monetize it as best as possible, and, like any other calculation, to attempt to "cure" or mitigate it to the extent it is cost-justified by the individuals who will bear those costs (a discussion for another thread). Reflexively showing extreme risk-aversion (specifically your statement that a small percentage chance of a very big, bad phenomenon) is in no way "logical" - actually, it is a defined error in economic analysis (Richard Posner has written a work on this effect about the proper economic analysis of catastrophes - I can point you to a variety of others if you have a phobia for Posner).

Second, many of the potential consequences of GW are hard to measure in economic terms. The extinction of species is one of them. Already many species are living on the edge of extinctions and their habitats are geographically limited to narrow regions. GW with high probability will make many of them extinct.

1) If something is "hard to measure in economic terms" then property rights are not being adequately granted or defended. Nobody says that the loss of land to GW is hard to measure in economic terms - we have markets for those. Create a market in a subject (say, a species within a border) and you'd be shocked how quickly you can get a realistic measurement of its value.

2) At a first approximation. all species are extinct. As an over-time perspective, 99.9%+ of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. The fact more species will go extinct as a result of GW is not persuasive: remember, without GW a number of species will go extinct anyway. In short, this is the Nirvana Fallacy in prime display. You have presented us with absolutely no evidence of one of two things:

2a) That more species will go extinct in the world post-GW over a relevant timespan (10, 100, 1000 years) than a world without GW, adjusting for the trillions of dollars to be spent on GW for, instead, say, species conservation (in case this is a normative good for you in and of itself, OR

2b) That the species that will go extinct in a post-GW world are economically or normatively "more valuable" than the ones that will go extinct in a world without GW.

In short, Xywalan, you can't just point to potential losses of species and declare that an inherent value that must be protected by the taxation or encumbrance of others. That is your value. Wonderful. Others have other values. To attempt to saddle the world with regulations in order to accomplish your personal normative ends is a polite form of tyranny. To attempt to use science to do so - without any serious econometrics, modeling of costs, or expositions on the comparable losses that other routes will have - is to make science a charade for your own normative agenda in the process.

Originally posted by Xywalan
To be honest, I found it really astonishing that some can easily sit back in their armchairs and wave their hands around the danger and inconvenience that threatens many people just because they don't want their companies to pay some taxes. Specially, since we know the given growth numbers are unsustainable and they must be stopped at some point.

To be honest, I find it really astonishing that you reflexively clamor to make "some people" pay more taxes - you know, the forced confiscation of earned wealth at gunpoint - to fit your own policy agenda without actually presenting any kind of statistical justifications for such.

No, wait. I don't find it astonishing at all. This kind of behavior is almost de rigueur of the modern environmentalist movement.

You still don't dispute my argument that such losses are difficult to measure in economic terms. Furthermore, maybe you don't care about the diversity of life on earth, the environment or even the lives of other people. Maybe you think caring about penguins is stupid. But still you don't dispute that my point is valid: many species will be lost because of GW. For some that is a reason to do something. For you apparently it is not. So you don't really have a factual disagreement with me. It's just that your value judgment is different.

I dispute it. Thoroughly. See above.

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Originally posted by Gaviani
If this is the case, why do you endorse policy proposals (or research statements embracing policy proposals) which impose massive (measured in multiple trillions of dollars) of costs in order to affect something we admittedly have limited information upon?

Science and policy share an underlying rule here I think you're blithely ignoring: big claims (or proposals) require big proof. Many GW policy advocates lack that.

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Essentially for the same reason people pay a lot of insurance money to protect them against unlikely events. This is definitely a value judgment but I would argue something that any reasonable person would agree. Furthermore, as I said, there is another moral issue here which you don't address. US contributes a lot to CO2 production but it will not suffer the possible consequences as much as some other countries. It is immoral to have something at the expense of others.

I somewhat agree with your next point but there is another point that you are missing. It would be great if we had a few more decades to devote to the study of the AGW and it's possible consequences all around the world. We know it is real, we know it will have some negative consequences and the scientists are working hard to understand the full consequences. But the full knowledge that you want will not come any time soon. It might be too late by then. Actually, some scientists disagree with strict and irreversible regulations because they feel they need more time to study.

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from: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...warming_2.html

The solution is to be flexible, argue Myles Allen and David Frame of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

In a commentary in Science, they say that we should work to reduce emissions now and meanwhile keep an eye on the warming.

If the world is warming more or less than we expected, then we can adjust our CO2 emissions.

The authors call on policymakers to "resist the temptation to fix a [CO2] concentration target early on. Once fixed, it may be politically impossible to reduce it."

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This is really interesting. I'd like to know what this actually means in a meaningful projection - some kind of demonstrable scientific projections as to long-term effects, etc.

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There is some work done on the very long term consequences of GW but I can't find too many. But here is one:

Long-term global warming scenarios computed with an efficient coupled climate model
S Rahmstorf, A Ganopolski - Climatic Change, 1999 - Springer

From what I can understand, they try to predict the long term GW effects on Europe. They detect two outcomes: either the ocean circulations recovers or collapses. In the second case they predict "a substantial long-lasting [they simulate things up to year 3000] cooling over the North Atlantic and a drying of Europe".

There are more articles but the point is at some point even if you change the CO2 concentrations to the original levels, not everything might go back to normal.

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"X is probably happening. However, there's very little research into Y effects of phenomenon X. That having been said, Y effects are probably mostly bad based on admittedly little research, and so we need to take drastic action to stop X because of Y."

Because that's essentially unpersuasive.

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Rising sea levels is definitely negative (although you might argue about how negative it is) and it will definitely happen. Other effects are not that well-understood but it's pretty much established that sudden environmental changes have dire consequences on many species.

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If something goes wrong we obviously have no place to run.

This is a truism that applies to literally every worldwide phenomenon. If you take national sovereignty seriously, it actually applies to every nationwide phenomenon too.

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So you don't actually dispute what I say.

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As I said before somewhere, feedback mechanisms are not known completely. It might be the case that a small warming might cause a chain of reactions that will result in a much larger warming. Again, this is probably very unlikely but the whole point is we really have no clue how likely it is and given the global nature of the change, the logical reaction is to try and not risk it.

No, the "logical reaction" to an unknown phenomenon - again, back to basic economics - isn't to reflexively attempt to avoid it. This is what we call an "expected value" calculation....

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I know pretty well what "the expected value" is. The fallacy here is that your value assignments are incorrect. For example, insurance is one of the things that has negative expected value but in most cases it is a reasonable choice. As further explanation, if your total wealth is say 100K$, then the negative magnitude of losing 100K$ (i.e., everything) is much more than the positive magnitude of winning 100K$; it's extremely stupid to engage in a gamble in which you either lose all your wealth (house, car, ...) for the 50% chance of doubling your wealth.

Of course it would be great if we had the perfect knowledge about the likelihood of the extreme feedback mechanisms. But we don't. However, we know that they have happened in the past so the probability is not that low.

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1) If something is "hard to measure in economic terms" then property rights are not being adequately granted or defended. Nobody says that the loss of land to GW is hard to measure in economic terms - we have markets for those. Create a market in a subject (say, a species within a border) and you'd be shocked how quickly you can get a realistic measurement of its value.

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I don't really get what you mean. Can you explain this a bit more? Are you saying you can economically measure, say loss of emperor penguins?

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[b]
2) At a first approximation. all species are extinct. As an over-time perspective, 99.9%+ of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. The fact more species will go extinct as a result of GW is not persuasive: remember, without GW a number of species will go extinct anyway.

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You are essentially saying "who cares?" I'm not going into that debate but let's first establish that the loss of many species is a very probable outcome.

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2a) That more species will go extinct in the world post-GW over a relevant timespan (10, 100, 1000 years) than a world without GW, adjusting for the trillions of dollars to be spent on GW for, instead, say, species conservation

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I don't really like the "adjusting for the trillions of dollars ..." part. It is extremely subjective. But factually speaking, many of the big extinction events have happened when earth's climate had undergone significant changes. AGW will be worst than of a natural change of same magnitude because the time span is much shorter. Evolutionary speaking, not much change can happen in a species within 1000 years but some evolutionary change can happen in say 100,000 years.

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2b) That the species that will go extinct in a post-GW world are economically or normatively "more valuable" than the ones that will go extinct in a world without GW.

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You are trying to impose your value judgment again. I would like to know if you have any factual disagreements.

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In short, Xywalan, you can't just point to potential losses of species and declare that an inherent value that must be protected by the taxation or encumbrance of others. That is your value. Wonderful. Others have other values. To attempt to saddle the world with regulations in order to accomplish your personal normative ends is a polite form of tyranny. To attempt to use science to do so - without any serious econometrics, modeling of costs, or expositions on the comparable losses that other routes will have - is to make science a charade for your own normative agenda in the process.

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It is not tyranny. As I have said before, it is a value judgment as well as a moral issue. You are conveniently avoiding a moral dilemma of causing permanent change to the world which will affect the future generalizations more than it will affect you. Who are you to say that for example, the penguins will be as worthless as to the future generations as are they to you? The point is causing this kind of global change is a moral issue that you cannot resolve by pulling some arbitrary economic calculations.

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To be honest, I find it really astonishing that you reflexively clamor to make "some people" pay more taxes - you know, the forced confiscation of earned wealth at gunpoint - to fit your own policy agenda without actually presenting any kind of statistical justifications for such.

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Taxation is not the forced confiscation of the earned wealth at the gunpoint. Furthermore, I have a mixed feeling about the taxation scheme but at least that is better than doing nothing.

[quote][i]But still you don't dispute that my point is valid: many species will be lost because of GW. [i]

I dispute it. Thoroughly. See above.[quote]

Where do you do that?


The above arguments are mostly about small points. What I would like to know is that do you support a carbon neutral economy or not?

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Originally posted by Xywalan
It will endanger many people who live at those coastal cities. That is not an economic problem. Consider Maldive: it consists of roughly thousand islets with an average height of 1.5 meters (4 feet 11 inch) and the highest point of 2.3 meters.

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That is wrong and misleading. Sea-level is not going to rise suddenly and drown all the population in the Maldives. It will happen gradually, and as I said, the help of the world is going to be required because that country is going to cease to exist.

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You still don't dispute my argument that such losses are difficult to measure in economic terms. Furthermore, maybe you don't care about the diversity of life on earth, the environment or even the lives of other people. Maybe you think caring about penguins is stupid. But still you don't dispute that my point is valid: many species will be lost because of GW. For some that is a reason to do something. For you apparently it is not. So you don't really have a factual disagreement with me. It's just that your value judgment is different.

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Levastire addressed it well, but I'd like to add another point. I don't understand why you assume I don't care about the diversity of line on earth. Evolutionary-wise, it is quite safe to assume that different climate will create new species. New reptiles, new insects, etc. You might like your penguins more, but in a global view, that's just hypocrisy. For example, if we were in the middle of an ice-age and NYC was a permafrost area where polar bears flourish, would you like them when they ate your neighbours or siblings because humans are easy prey? I think you'd be praying for giant flies and mosquitos if that was the case.

The planet has been warmer and survived it. Will we survive it? No one knows. We are just a tiny comma (and that's an exaggeration) in this planet's history. If we are driving ourself to extinction (by enhancing GW and doing other stupid stuff), that's probably the best thing the planet can hope for. A million years after the planet ejected us, there will be no remnant of our damage.

Xywalan, I don't like the dogpile effect of a thread where everyone's beating on the one person, but you're the only one posting that side of the debate, so I have to quote you. Sorry :(

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Originally posted by Xywalan
First, effects of global warming are one of the active areas of research because it's something that we do not understand to a sufficient degree.

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Right; it's a popular subject these days, and so it gets funded. That's always the case; cancer research is constantly in the public eye, so it gets funded, but research into other problems may have to work harder to get money. The amount of research done doesn't prove its importance, only its profile. When GW wasn't as much in the public eye, it wasn't as funded.

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Of course, some effects will definitely happen. For instance, sea levels will rise because of both the thermal expansion of water, as well as melting ice caps. Other effects are not easily understood.

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It's not so definite actually. The warmer the oceans, the more water evaporates from them. Increasing global temperatures by a degree would serve to increase the amount of cycled water, which would mean more water in lakes and rivers, and quite possibly the water table would rise. This is speculation on my part (plausible and scientifically-backed speculation, and shared with several scientific minds, but speculation nonetheless), but this is where the aforementioned research comes in. Just what WILL happen? Perhaps this is the precursor to an ice age - because, to get the classic ice age phenomenon of, well, ice everywhere, you need to start with lots of evaporation.

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n essence, since GW's definite consequences are mostly negative, even though it might have positive effects somewhere (such as expansion of agriculture in Canada) the logical action is to stop this global change. If something goes wrong we obviously have no place to run.

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As the other parts of this have already been addressed, I'll just add this one point. Suppose we DO know that something is going to be negative - which largely means, to cause unpleasantness for humans. (Why should the rest of the world's inhabitants care if one of our coastal cities gets flooded out? That's our problem.) Does this mean automatically that the logical action is to stop this change?

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... we really have no clue how likely it is and given the global nature of the change, the logical reaction is to try and not risk it.

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On the contrary; if something is happening that we don't understand, the best thing to do is observe. Whether or not we take action against it is a decision which should only be taken when we understand the consequences. Especially when taking action is going to be a majorly expensive and potentially disruptive (to the balance and cycles of nature, not just to our convenience) undertaking.

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Second, many of the potential consequences of GW are hard to measure in economic terms. The extinction of species is one of them. Already many species are living on the edge of extinctions and their habitats are geographically limited to narrow regions. GW with high probability will make many of them extinct.

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Not necessarily. Lots of species will flourish in a slightly warmer environment. Also, this is a purely emotive argument - "Won't somebody think of the children!". Until there is evidence (see research above) showing that Genus X will be at considerable risk, leaving Species Y and Species Z unlikely to survive, this is not a viable line of argument.

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Originally posted by Xywalan
It will endanger many people who live at those coastal cities. That is not an economic problem. Consider Maldive: it consists of roughly thousand islets with an average height of 1.5 meters (4 feet 11 inch) and the highest point of 2.3 meters.

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The difference in water level caused by GW is dwarfed by tidal changes. What does this mean? That, should such flooding occur, it won't be a single event (like the Boxing Day tsunami a couple years ago) - it will manifest itself as a little bit of water splashing in at high tide in certain weathers, and then as periodic floods, before it actually gets to the point of being unlivable. People will have plenty of time to decide that they don't really like this place to live. When you talk of flooding the coastal cities, everyone thinks of massive amounts of water all at once, causing death and destruction. It wouldn't be like that at all.

Take all the megabucks being spent to fight GW, and put them all into research into finding out exactly what a warmer planet will mean. Then, and only then, should we start taking invasive action. Of course, in the meantime, it doesn't hurt to take obvious actions that won't hurt anything, like choosing to use less energy (stave off the heat death!) or keep some greenery rather than concreting it all over.

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Xywalan, I don't like the dogpile effect of a thread where everyone's beating on the one person, but you're the only one posting that side of the debate, so I have to quote you. Sorry

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It's fine. The only problem is this is starting to take too much time. So I thought it's better to summarize the argument into points, maybe the debate will be more clear and a bit manageable.


First, I must say that I'm more interested in the factual side of the story rather than the subjective aspects of it. For this reason, I think the following points are the most important questions that need to be answered first.

1. Is globe getting warmer?
2. Are we increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?
3. Roughly speaking, how much the globe will get warmer if we increase the amount of CO2 by X ppm?
4. What could be the possible effects of global temperature increase by Y degrees?

Only after having some answers to those questions that we can start arguing about the costs/benefits of stopping GW.

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Originally posted by Xywalan
... he's talking about the Al Gore movie but I can't see his slides.

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Since opening the PDF to view alongside is too much effort, here's a version of the video with the slides incorporated.

Updated with Slides - Lord Christopher Monckton Speaking in St. Paul

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Originally posted by Gaviani
Therefore, the "logical reaction" is actually to attempt to estimate the expected value of global warming (positive, negative, and inbetween), to monetize it as best as possible, and, like any other calculation, to attempt to "cure" or mitigate it to the extent it is cost-justified by the individuals who will bear those costs (a discussion for another thread).

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Oh no, this is why I made the thread.

The costs as I see it are more than monetary, but a surrender of much of the signing nations sovereignty.

If it was entirely above board, you would think that such a wonderful treaty would get alot more airtime, instead this is being conducted as a backroom deal.

As Monckton says, "How many of you think that the word election or democracy or vote or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn't appear once."

This woman writing for The Australian sums it up quite well.

Beware the UN's Copenhagen Plot

And for good measure.

Climate Modeling Nonsense

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Climatologists don’t seem to have a concept of testing, and prefer to use the term “verification” instead—that is, they do not seek to invalidate their models; they only seek supporting evidence. My scepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.

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This is not posted for Xywalan, rather I want those of you who, like myself, are yet to commit to a religion on the topic of AGW to take a look.