A good sober look at the future

[snousle]

Here's an article that talks good sense about oil production and global warming:

The Icarus Syndrome.

Worth a read. I particularly appreciate its attention to quantitative assessments of these issues, something that is too often absent from environmentalist perspectives. With all the flap about whether global warming is "real", there is very little about how much it matters. And the answer is: maybe not much, maybe a lot, but most likely not as much as things we don't even know about yet.

Interesting further commentary on the article here.

Comments

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

The thing is, there are benefits beyond CO2 reductions to getting away from fossil fuels where possible - especially in the case of petroleum imported from volatile parts of the world.

Cleaner air would result in lower health care costs due to certain respiratory problems, for example. The investment in building a new national power grid, wind farms and solar power stations would provide a major and long lasting boost to the US economy from wages and industrial activity. (And then there's the balance of trade benefit of not shipping so much money overseas for energy.)

Sure, I'm concerned about climate change - but there are much more concrete reasons to get us moving away - at a reasonable pace - from fossil fuels in general and petroleum in particular. (Frankly, I think petroleum is too valuable a basis for chemistry - plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. - to waste by burning the stuff!) Averting climate change - however drastic, or not - would be a "bonus."

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Idealistically, I would make a much more radical proposal - that the whole country would be better off with a smaller and more equitable economy. But what is possible in principle and what is politically possible are wildly different things. Plenty of wind power is available, for example, but I'd wager it's politically impossible to construct the necessary distribution system at this point. Alternative energy will happen when it's cheaper than oil. I don't see any chance it will unfold on a different schedule. But that time probably isn't so far off anyway.

He didn't talk about tipping points.

[beartech420.livejournal.com]

I read the article. The writer never mentioned the concept of tipping points in global warming. The possibility that the 4 degree warming on the planet will effect changes more at the poles. How much of our GDP would be effected if Greenland ice melted and flooded large amount of our coastline where many major cities and industry reside.

He took a mild example of England's coal shortage to describe our present situation. That's fine but maybe a better example is the factors in the collapse of an empire? I know I'm using the house of cards argument, but maybe that argument is more useful because it does get people off their butts and mobilized to do something quickly.
And when more and more people decide to do something quickly the whole group will compromise and get around to doing something slower.
When we started to have Earth Days in the 70s people were in this bell curve of activism. At one end people taking their house off the grid setting up wind turbines. At the other end people every once in a while recycling. I tend to like the house of cards view because of the great inertia there is to make whole nations to change.
BestRegards,
Pete

Re: He didn't talk about tipping points.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I would say that "tipping points" falls under his discussion of "models being wildly optimistic". In any case, there is no likely scenario where the ice would melt before 2100, and the whole point of the article is that risks affecting us a hundred years in the future are not ones we can act intelligently on now.

I tend to like the house of cards view because of the great inertia there is to make whole nations to change.

Translation: You like the idea of controlling people's behavior with scary stories.

Re: He didn't talk about tipping points.

[beartech420.livejournal.com]

Okay Tony you want scary stories? Here is one. Climate models like weather model don't work well with non-linear variables.

We can talk about one or 2 of them like the oceans heating up causing methane hydride to melt into methane into the atmosphere, methane being I think 200 times the green house gas.

How about permafrost melting because of less snow. Less heat is reflected back into space and at the same time bacteria in the warm soil will produce more CO2.

You even have the possibility of an Ice Age. Greenland pours enough fresh water into the north Atlantic stopping the gulf stream which transports heat to northern Europe.

What I believe is we are doing dangerous experiments with our climate and we cannot predict well what will happen even 10 years from now.

As for inertia we have had 8 years of a fucktard president who denied climate change was happening because he was connected at the hips with big oil.

You can't even talk to China and India about curbing greenhouse gasses China is building a new coal power plant ever 2 weeks.

On the plus side non-linear variables go both ways. It is believed that 51 million years ago a runaway climate change was stopped by algae blooms growing in lakes in Canada and Russia.

One last house of cards story. Look at the factors for the decline of the Roman Empire and you will find a lot of similarities with America.
Pete

Re: He didn't talk about tipping points.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

The whole point of this article is that such speculation is unbounded. I could create a list of scary scenarios ten times longer than this. Why is it that when conservatives whip up fear about radical Islam, it's scaremongering, while when liberals do this about the environment it's merely prudence?

I sure hope that the decline of the Roman Empire is a good model for America, because their period of decadence and decline lasted a rather long time - arguably longer than the US has even existed. If the comparison is apt, the rest of our lives might be very pleasant indeed.

Re: He didn't talk about tipping points.

[beartech420.livejournal.com]

Tony the stakes are higher with the experiments we are doing with our climate compared to Islamic terrorism.
We are right now putting out more CO2 every year with no idea how the only place we have to live will react. It just makes sense to try to bring these levels down to where they were 50 or a 100 years ago.

We need to quickly stop this rate of increase which we aren't and we need a plan to start reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere which we as a race are clueless about.
That scares me it should scare everyone.

It's not a book, but...

[bikrcowboy.livejournal.com]

Thinking perhaps the Icarus Syndrome article was also a book, I searched for it on Amazon. Search results include:

* The Icarus Syndrome: The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the U.S. Air Force by Carl H. Builder
* Icarus Syndrome by Dax (Audio CD)
* Icarus Syndrome by Age Of Ruin (Music Download)
* The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer
* The Energy of Money: A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Personal Fulfillment by Maria Phd Nemeth
* The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science) by Richard Dawkins
* Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) by Robert Pape
* Money Masters of Our Time by John Train
* Jacked Up: The Inside Story of How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the Worlds Greatest Company by Bill Lane
* American Defense Policy by Paul J. Bolt, Damon V. Coletta, and Collins G., Jr. Shackelford
* The Soul's Religion by Thomas Moore
* The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today by Helena Cronin and John Maynard Smith

...and many others. It's a pretty diverse syndrome, evidently. The Icarus analogy applies to lots of things. (I like the peacock one..)

It strikes me that the various quantitative arguments can & will never be resolved, because there are too many presumptions, possibilities, and beliefs, and simply put, nobody really knows whereof they speak.

My attitude has always been: Why argue about it? Climate change notwithstanding:

* We neeed/want lots of energy.
* We can't live forever on oil.
* Coal and nukes are very hazardous and expensive.
* R&D on alternatives is good for science & education.
* Sensible implementation of alternatives would create zillions of jobs, and is good for the economy.

So let's get going, already!