I’m ready.

So whatever we may think of Al Gore, a lot of readers probably don’t see how his WWII analogy demonstrates moral-compass-dysfunction.

Chief Wiggums: the point about Gore’s “carbon footprint” being hypocrisy seems to come straight out of the Competitive Enterprise Institute http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5425355. That campaign is one of the funniest things (almost enough to make you cry) that I have come accross since the “Duck and Cover!” approach to surviving a Nucular war.

In the Sept 9th edition of the Economist, the special edition called “The Heat is On” http://www.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7852924, there is an article that addresses the cost of adopting policies to mitigate climate change. The gist – it does not have to be as expensive as all that. Costs, of course, should be weighed against benefits. I think that envirnomentally sound policy is a better investment than a war any day.

I think the climate change question can be seen as a starting point for a broader discussion.

To create order in a closed system (i.e., creating an industrial society on earth with a lot of comfort for everyone, which requires energy), there are costs that go beyond the simple calculations of extraction. Whenever we create order in the closed systems of our civilization, we draw upon energy from outside the system, and sowing disorder, or entropy. In my view, any policy that aims at mitigating entropy is a more sustainable one, that has a better chance of leaving behind a habitable world for those who come after us. So before one labels such solutions as “anti-growth”, one should factor in the sustainability of that growth. Forgive the metaphor, but perhaps it is better to burn slowly and steadily than to flame out in a big flash of light?

Another question you raise has to do with if change is natural, why is it bad? That is a question about society and politics, and it is interesting. There has been climate change throughout human history. Some students of history have pointed to a link between the wetting and drying cycles on the Eurasian Steppe, for instance, as a factor that triggered the waves of Great Migrations of steppe nomads into Europe, China and the Middle East, with the enormous impact on civilization that followed. I think there is enough historical evidence to allow us to infer that indeed climate change was a major factor in the rise and fall of complex societies (as Jared Diamond points out in Collapse). The question for us is how will our civilization come with rapid climate change?

One thing that is different from the days of the Great Migrations past is that now we have nation-states, and a different notion of citizenship. Sea levels have risen and fallen before, deserts have expanded and shrunk, but the planet was never so crowded by people as it is now, and there were not so many well-defined borders in the past. Now we have a nation-state, the Maldives, that could actually disappear in the next century. They will become real “envirnomental refugees”. There is no international instrument to deal with this phenomenon of people displaced by the environment – the definition of “refugee” as it stands has to do with a well-founded fear of persecution in the home country, not a well-founded fear that the country will physically disappear. I think the next 10 years will see the adoption of a new Convention to deal with people displaced by environmental change.

We have cities on coasts that are much larger than any city in the past. So the impact on people will be different than before, in scale at any rate.

Will spending money on reducing emissions prevent the pain that might lie ahead for these people? It may help mitigate the pain. Even if it does not, if it results in the preservation and better use of the land and resources that we have left, it must surely be worth the effort.

To sum up, I think that a good policy must try to reduce the rate of entropy on our planet; that may mean slowing industrial growth; it may mean that most of us have to do with less in the next century. But the harm of a faster rate of the increase of entropy seems much more serious to me. War, in my view, is the greatest accelerator of entropy that we have.

Tell that to the people in New Orleans! Oh, I forgot, those on the ship to mars will not be from there.

“Our enemies wouldn’t have a chance against the US-Global Warming Alliance!”

When you say: “our enemies” do you mean countries like Canada, Mexico, and, I don’t know, the rest of the world. I get it; they are either with us or against us!

Yes, like the Clean Air Act we use a reverse-o foreign policy making process. We start sanctioning nations who meet their environmental standards instead of those who don’t. Instead of declaring war on North Korea for testing a nuke we declare war on those who don’t test nukes.

Sorry, but I think that is our foreign policy!!

Unfortunately, as Curzon says, measures such as the Kyoto protocol, conservation, or alternative fuels will not be sufficient. We seem to have already broken the climate equilibriam of the past few centuries, and simply cutting down our rate of change to the system, even to zero, will not reset it to its previous state. While conservation, clean energy, etc are extremely good things on any number of environmental, economic, geo-political metrics, they are most likely far too minor to fix the climate mess that we have caused.

However, this does not mean that action is impossible, it merely means that pro-active measures must be taken. Unfortunately, the long term solutions that seem most effective based on what I have read (and I am far from an expert) are things that seem like science fiction to most people, and are beyond our current technology. Luckily, technology moves quite quickly, and I do believe that with a concerted effort we can easily develop the technologies needed for large scale climactic control over the next few decades, before the worst of the danger has arrived.

For example, Joe mentioned one fairly low tech method of climate alteration, through redistribution of seawater through canal digging. While this is almost a trivial task-moving lots of ground, after all we have already built many large canals and dams-we still lack the computer models that would allow us to redistribute water in the correct ways.

There are also other, more high-tech, technologies that could allow us to alter the climate in deliberate ways, such as any number of bio-engineering projects, seeding the oceans or soil with algae or bacteria that can alter the atmosphere in a certain way, or reflect sun light away. An even more futuristic, but arguably safer technique would be large mirrors of translucent and reflective sail like material, in space. Unlike an organism introduced into the ecosystem, which could easily mutate or grow beyond our control, a network of solar reflectors could be redistributed in response to other variables or more sophisticated climate simulations. I believe that for a civilization that is preparing to visit Mars in the near future, this system would not be as fantastic as it seems in the next half a century or so.

Of course, any climate engineering requires VERY good computer models, and VERY good data, or you may just make things worse instead of better. I think that in the near term, this should be our priority: Developing and deploying a vast global network of climate sensors, in land, sea, air and space-and then using that data to build increasingly good climate models. Luckily, computer power continues to grow at a geometric rate and there is little doubt that we will have the computational resources to run the required simulations, as long as we have the data to build the required mathematical models.

There is a place for classic environmental action, and the importance of clean air and water, healthy ecosystems, combatting soil erosion, fighting extinction, etc. should not be underplayed, but I think that climate control will require more dramatic tactics. And let’s not mince words- the phrase “stopping climate change” is fairly meaningless. Most of the articles I have seen in recent years on climate change admit that even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today it would only slow down the humanity-induced climate change that has begun. What we want, and need, to be able to do is to affect the global climate such that the entire global ecosystem-including humanity-can survive in comfort into the coming centuries.

Oh, and I haven’t seen the movie. I’m not particularly interested. As this post should make clear, I already believe that human induced climate change is a problem, and don’t really want a preachy introduction to the issue, even if it MAY be one I largely agree with.

I’m skeptical as to whether this would actually help keep Florida from drowning, but putting some of these areas under water sounds like a good idea to me. My grandkids could scuba dive to view the ruins of the West Bank settlements…

human production of greenhouse gases is believed (by a vast majority of climatologists, not merely sixth grade science teachers or “scientists,” as our non-”scientist” friends pain themselves to articulate) to play a role in this increase in the earth’s climate that we are observing.

1. The costs of the war in Iraq must be reexamined by goodly Lord Curzon, and assessed in a more rigorous manner for cost comparison with Kyoto.

2. The biosphere, as a matter of a natural dynamic equilibrium (which we are upsetting), produces upwards of 90-95% of the cyclical carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is no “scientist” or “injun” or “treehugger” arguing that there is something to be addressed here, so that laborious pontifications thereupon are irrelevant.

3. We reverse our contribution to non-cyclical carbon dioxide by reducing hydrocarbon combustions as a source of power, and by refixating the carbon in plant-life in the biosphere.

4. The impending environmental doom is a slow process. I am willing to wager that nery a one of us here would like to be subject to the environment of the ice ages, nor its warm analog.

5. The extinction of species may be natural (acceptable), or man-cause (unacceptable), just like the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere.

6. Clausula rebus sic stantibus … vigilantibus non dormientibus aequitas subvenit ... we must act. Not because Göring commands us, nor Tsar Nikolay II, nor Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, nor even Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, but because we are all affected … our farms will become fallow.

but you might be interested in the following wich is essentially a reprint of a letter to the Economist correcting them about thier science ussage.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/carl-wunsch-the-economist-and-the-gulf-stream/#more-356

Its a good site, technical, but if you read it slowly theres no problem.

Sounds like a plan to me. What bothers me is this is not how the Bush Administration appears to have been dealing with the EPA or other federal agencies on the environment. Apparently enforcement of existing policies such as the Clean Air Act, such as scrubbers for coal-fired plants, have been slapped down due to anecdotal complaints, which are used to question the science behind the policy. Placing scrubbers on coal-fired plants is a perfect example of the sort of climate change controls we can actually do today, and has been outlined as clear and effective steps since the first Bush Administration. How do we pay for it? The market ought to, and effective political leadership would both police companies on inflating costs passed on to consumers and asking them to do their bit by paying higher prices. Mind you, it’s a one-time cost to upgrade, not a perpetual price hike.

This Berkeley panel discussion, not made up of tree huggers despite the venue, has more. Check out Bruce Buckheit’s talk.

The recent explosion in North Carolina, by the way, is decent micro-example of how the U.S. government could be tougher on environmental issues. We may not stop the ice caps from melting, but we sure as hell could drive a market in pollution reducing and safety technologies at the very least for our own citizens comfort and security. Ever hear of Cancer Alley down in Louisiana?

Now, regarding what Cuzon said above about there being a 97-0 vote against Kyoto, well, that, too demonstrates that the problem lies NOT with the protocol, but with the U.S. system. As much as some supposed “patriots” believe that the world revolves around U.S. decisions, I’m afraid it doesn’t. Change the system.
And since Cuzon has mentioned propaganda, one of my favorite subjects, here’s one of my favorites which also comes from a Nazi:

“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” (H. Goering)
ps. Can just add environmentalists to the mix, too!kb

Curzon: I am in complete agreement with you that many of the measures put forward by the environmental lobby are at best impractical and uneconomic, at worst potentially harmful. Hybrid vehicles (at least as for typical use in N. America) come to mind as an example of the former and possibly the latter. As far as the Kyoto Protocol is concerned, it seems to me that China by itself is going to make a mockery of all other countries’ attempts at limiting carbon dioxide emissions, £80bn a year or otherwise. So please do not think that my writing is an appeal for ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (or various malformed successors) or for everyone to put on a sweater and turn down the thermostat. The challenges of global climate change are not going to be solved by U.N.-style international consensus, such as it is, nor by conscientious greenies bicycling to work.

The position that I’m trying to articulate is altogether different than the view of mainstream environmentalism, and perhaps could be distilled down to this: let’s make it the planet that we want it to be, not just yoke ourselves (at great expense, nonetheless!) to remain subject to the whims of nature. As Rommel pointed out, lots of “naturalists”Â? despise this idea, because it means that we finally give up the idea that the Earth can be preserved in some sort of static state for our amusement, with “nature”Â? on one side of the fence and “humanity”Â? on the other.

In a bit more detail, what I’m proposing is that:

1) We should decide what constitutes comfortable climate for us (and for the other species upon which we rely) – not merely select some arbitrary climate state as the status quo.

2) We should then undertake active measures in attempts to bring about what we’ve decided is acceptable climate. By active, I mean climate control, rather than simply limiting our environmental impact in the hopes the earth continues (or returns to) being as comfortable as it has been since our ancestors crawled out of the swamp. The natural history of extinction tells us that expecting the Earth to remain habitable (for us) is a losing bet. We have technologies that can be used to change the climate today. The challenge is controlling what is an exceptionally complex system. But I believe that we’ll have the computer capabilities necessary to actively manage the Earth’s climate in the next few decades, not centuries.

3) Those same active measures should take into account our using substantially more energy in the future, per capita, than we use today, especially if any progress is made towards sustained fusion reactors.

What’s the cost of all of this? Difficult to say. Could it be in the billions of pounds per year? Perhaps. I would argue that some of that cost would be offset by worldwide gains in productivity, and by improved living conditions for many. Malaria, malnutrition, clean water, starvation, and many of the other ills that you mentioned could be alleviated in part or in whole by improved climate.

How’s this for a reality check: if the US and Australia joined the other countries that have signed Kyoto, it would cost worldwide a whopping £80bn a year for the rest of the century. That’s like reinvading another Iraq every year between now and the 22nd century. What would the end result be? It would postpone global warming by six years over this century. That’s right, for such a collosal cost you would barely have any impact on climate change.

Compare that with all the good we could be doing for far less money, measured in combatting malaria, malnutrition, AIDS/HIV, clean water, starvation, and all the rest, all of which come with a specific benefit. Kyoto and similar measures slow global warming by six years for an absurdly high cost. That makes no sense, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Bottom line is that it’s simply not worth it. I’m willing to listen to a policy conceived through a practical look at the facts, based in intellectual rigor and public policy realism. I think lots of skeptics such as myself feel this way. But the reason Mr. Gore and his ilk can’t summon up anything more than “we have to do SOMETHING” is because that’s all they can say, they are aware of what I’ve written, and the fundamental motivations are more based in what I talk about in the last paragraphs than anything else.

I agree with you that we need to be personally responsible in energy consumption and our personal habits. But be prepared that even were we all to lead clean, green, recycled lives, the earth will continue to get warmer at the same rate.

I agree that An Inconvenient Truth is propaganda. And while I’m an engineer – not a climatologist (IANAC?) – I know enough about complex systems and emergent properties to know that we may never be able to establish a causal link between CO2 and global warming. (On the other hand, the correlation between the two is more than a tad suspicious. I’ll not debate the relationship here.)

Neither of these points negates the fact that climate change is for real, as Curzon himself accepts at the beginning of his posting. One need not believe any of what Al Gore says to understand that the probability of climate change over geologic timescales is 100%. Nor is it important, frankly, if the root cause of climate change is human, animal, mineral, or supernatural.

What is important is that we have a habitable planet in ten, one hundred, and a thousand years from now. Actually, I’d like to raise the bar a bit higher; I’m not just interested in the Earth being habitable, I’m interested in it being comfortable. Climatologically stable wouldn’t hurt either.

Is engineering the climate beyond us? To quote Curzon: “Climate change is probably bad, but there are no steps we can take that will stop global warming”Â?. Poppycock. Perhaps Curzon and I will have to disagree, but I firmly believe that we are in an anthopocene age. We can alter the climate. I, for one, believe that we are already doing so, and perhaps not in ways that are in our best interests. Even if you do not believe in restricting carbon dioxide emissions, there are other ways of cooling the globe. Emitting more aerosols is one example, launching satellites to reflect solar energy is another. Raising the albedo of the surface of the Earth is not beyond our capabilities, and would reflect more energy back into space. Perhaps all of these things should be investigated, in the interests of keeping our coastal cities above water and our farmlands fertile.

In summary: whether or not you happen to believe that humans are at the root of global warming, whether or not you happen to agree with Citizen Gore, it seems to me profoundly reasonable to take steps to ensure that our lives (and our children’s lives) continue without great climatological disruption. I believe that it’s in our power to do so, and I’m not afraid of exercising that power in attempts to secure our future.