21 ms·

Climate science: A sensitive matter

64 points by iProject 14y ago

Retric 14y ago
I can't help but wonder why the economist would mention something and then say "This study has not been peer-reviewed." I would assume there are plenty of peer reviewed literature to look at so why did they bother to even read it? Is this something that has revived little research, because people are still assuming it's a short term anomaly? As to energy-balance models's they don't account for the huge difference in average temperatures between the poles and the equator, it takes far less energy to maintain a 3C increase in Alaska than Florida. As such weather patterns are really important.
- pav3l 14y ago
  "Peer-reviewed" does not mean correct, or vice versa. The study they are talking about was done by the Research Council of Norway. I am assuming the goal was to inform the public, not to get published in a scientific journal. It was not an academic exercise. I, for one, am very happy that the Economist included this study in their survey.
  - Retric 14y ago
    The primary advantage to being peer reviewed is to avoid stupid mistakes. That's not to say it's correct, but it's like saying here is my book I did not have anyone proofread it. It could be a great book, but I just had a few red flags pop up. Now, if the goal is to inform the public you base it on some peer reviewed research and repackage that instead of releasing original research in that fashion. All I am saying is the way the economist presented it was odd. I was assuming they where looking for something to create a little controversy to keep things interesting, but it just seemed odd to use something as a reference and then make it seem less credible at the same time.
    - shardling 14y ago
      > I was assuming they where looking for something to create a little controversy to keep things interesting, but it just seemed odd to use something as a reference and then make it seem less credible at the same time. If a report like that is well written, it will provide a decent introduction to the ideas, and also have an exhaustive list of references. In that sense it makes a better reference for a journalist or layman than the original papers, which can be hard to interpret! And you can still go and look at the original sources if you like.
- btilly 14y ago
  Given how much peer-reviewed research they also referenced that came to similar conclusions, I would assume that it is to make the point that this is an area of currently active research.
crazy1van 14y ago
Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. Clearly it is not as brittle as the typical climate scientist would have us believe.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 14y ago
  > Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a [. . .] Because of the wealth of evidence that tells us otherwise. > can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. 'absorbing shocks' and 'supporting life' doesn't mean 'supporting human life comfortably'. I don't understand the outrage about climate change, since reducing co2 emissions is mostly about being more energy efficient. How is that a terrible thing? My parents lived through 'Pea Soupers'[1] (a 4 day fog killed 4,000 people in London); we've seen the effects of gridlock and poor public transport; working on better solutions before the billions of China and India need a gas-guzzling car each doesn't feel like having any downsides. [1] (http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.html http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.h...)
  - marknutter 14y ago
    There's nothing wrong with wanting to be energy efficient but when that means telling developing nations like China and India that they are not allowed to burn as many fossil fuels as developed nations did when they were developing you're likely to get some pushback. The only feasible solution to the problem is to find energy sources that produce at or above the levels the world requires today, but does so in a clean way. The only one that comes to mind for me is nuclear power.
    - sageikosa 14y ago
      I agree that geo-political realities make any global coordinated attempts to alter real inputs to various climate models unfeasible. As long as people want to see their children grow up to prosper, they won't want to sacrifice for a foreigner's objective. It is the same principle that has caused indolent civilizations to fall to foreign aggressors, the one that doesn't follow the pattern wins. And not everyone will believe the enlightened creed of less is better.
FD3SA 14y ago
We seldom address climate discussions from a perspective of geological timescales [1]. From this, it is clear that life has existed on earth throughout an extreme range of atmospheric conditions. However, it is quite possible that nature's response to these conditions may be severely limited due to human intervention (clear-cutting rain forests, etc.). I hope that in the near future it will be economically advantageous to transition away from fossil fuels. Elon Musk believes this will be the case [2], and I sincerely hope he is correct. Fossil fuels are a non-sustainable energy source which are being rapidly depleted and already cost far more in externalities than we realize (pollution, war, market instability, etc.). Climate change should not be the only impetus for a transition to a sustainable energy infrastructure. 1. http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg 2. http://www.treehugger.com/cars/elon-musk-ted-talk-2013-tesla-spacex-solarcity-and-more.html http://www.treehugger.com/cars/elon-musk-ted-talk-2013-tesla...
- vixen99 14y ago
  Not my impression. Any denizen of climate sites is rather familiar with a wide range of historical climate graphs created from an amazing number of proxies. My favourite is the analysis based on algae which synthesize a range of saturated and unsaturated fats denpending on the water temperature.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  Nature doesn't respond to conditions. Evolution isn't a process of intentions; such that we can state: "nature intends" for such-and-such a species to exist/thrive/die, except for the intervention of unnatural events. Nature is conditions, and man is a part of the equation.
  - hackinthebochs 14y ago
    This comment is quickly going the way of "correlation doesn't equal causation" style of karma-whoring. It's so overused, and more often than not misplaced, that it's a net negative to the discussion. Yes, evolution doesn't have intentions or goals, but scientists, actual zoologists and evolutionary biologists, speak of "intentions", "goals", etc when speaking of evolutionary processes (just open a Dawkins book). Anthropomorphizing a natural process is a short-hand that allows one to communicate ideas more effectively and more naturally. Everyone knows that there isn't an actual Gaia-like being pulling the strings of nature. Pointing this out is just noise in an otherwise productive conversation.
adventured 14y ago
Currently enjoying a foot of snow in my yard in Spring, with this being the 4th greatest snow fall season in recorded history locally. Yeah I'm a skeptic. Global cooling -> global warming -> global climate change. As the climate fails to heat up as predicted, the names and claims will once again shift.
- cgh 14y ago
  Climate != weather. This is a pretty basic distinction.
  - mason240 14y ago
    Unless it's bad weather. Then it will be used as an anecdote to "prove" AGW (as Hurricane Sandy is).
- gmac 14y ago
  Which is why the phrase 'climate change' is preferred to 'global warming'. Mean global temperatures will rise, and a key result of this may well be higher variability, with correspondingly more extreme weather events. There is no sense in which a freak snowfall disproves climate change: quite the reverse.
  - Shivetya 14y ago
    Granted, but a little over a hundred years ago there were some might fine blizzards not equaled since. I think they key here is, people lost interest when every little thing was declared global warming and then started rolling their eyes when the switch was made to "climate change". Fanaticism has a tendency to cause people to tune out, worse is when its driven to political and financial benefit of a few.
  - nice1 14y ago
    Why should mean global temperatures rise? There seems to be no actual evidence for this.
- jbooth 14y ago
tokenadult 14y ago
The fossils in the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/03/27/mysteries-of-the-tar-pits/ http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/03/27/mysteries-of-the-tar-p... provide a rich record of a variety of mammal and bird species going through almost 30,000 years of the last glacial-interglacial cycle. What's remarkable about the fossils is the statis in the body forms of the wide variety of animals trapped in the tar pits. Significant climate change resulted in indistinguishable evolutionary change in those animals. As scientists continue to work on predicting the probable effects of future climate changes, looking back on verifiable examples like well dated fossil beds will be helpful in putting bounds on the predictions.
- btilly 14y ago
  There is nothing remarkable about that. 30,000 years is very short evolutionarily. The best response to climate change in that time frame is migration, not adaptation.
  - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
    30,000 is an evolutionary eternity. The huge variety of bizarre dog breeds was created over a few centuries. Foxes were turned from nigh untameable wild animals into pets in a few decades.
    - jessriedel 14y ago
      That's not evolution, that's selective breeding by humans.
      - agildehaus 14y ago
        Selection is a component of evolution. Human selection is just one type of it, natural being the other. Wolves did evolve into dogs, but not naturally by our definition of "natural".
    - btilly 14y ago
      Yes, 10,000 years is a long enough time to create a whole new species under normal circumstances. Under the forced breeding that people do, it goes even faster. But normally a species is pretty well adapted to its environment and does not have trivially obvious improvements to make, and therefore changes slowly. Therefore the the average mammalian species manages to survive mostly unchanged for about a million years or so (figure shamelessly stolen from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_extinction_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_extinction_rate - and they cite a 1993 study for it). Thus one would expect, on average, that 97% of the mammalian species that were around 30,000 years ago that to still be around and recognizably be the same kind of animal. This is not actually so, and the main reasons are extinction events caused by people, and the effects of domestic breeding on chickens, dogs, carrots, tomatoes, and so on. But outside of types of things created by humans, there aren't a whole lot of new species running around that didn't exist in pretty close to their current form 30,000 years ago. For example there is likely less genetic difference between you and our ancestors 30,000 years ago than there is between you and an Australian aborigine.
guscost 14y ago
Politicians shouldn't be allowed to manipulate the energy industry, period. Questions about the analysis of temperature signals are interesting but often beside the point.
- pagekicker 14y ago
  And the energy industry shouldn't be allowed to manipulate politicians?
  - guscost 14y ago
    Of course, but that doesn't justify corruption.
    - pagekicker 14y ago
      Didn't say that it did.
gmcquillan 14y ago
I don't know that I agree with the thesis of this article whatsoever; basically some cherry-picked research estimates "we may only see 1.5 to 2 degree increases, and we haven't had any real warming in the past 10 years; Therefore, we might want to reevaluate the amount of energy and attention we spend on mitigating carbon emissions" That seems like a pretty flimsy argument. 1. I don't think there's strong evidence that 'global average temperatures stopped increasing.' Many of the world's largest average temperature readings have happened in the last ten years (2010, especially, but even recent reports show upward trends: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/13 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/13). 2. Cherry-picking a few people whose models show a lower than average range, doesn't tell me anything other than the author of this article is suffering from wishful thinking. 3. The heart of the article seems to be suggesting this: "If climate change isn't that bad, maybe we don't have to do anything about it, " but ignores the opposite proposition. Oddly, I'm not even sure why such an article is necessary since the world collectively isn't making any earnest attempts to curb carbon emissions. Any reductions have been economically based, not environmental. No, I think this is a hit piece on the climate change movement couched as due-diligence and beneficial skepticism.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Interesting take on it. I didn't see it as a hit piece so much as a "Hmm, what do we make of this?" piece. The data that the temperature for the last 10 years has remained basically flat is coming from the exact same sources that have advocated awareness of anthropogenic change, the IPCC being one of them. Unless things change a lot we're very much in danger of having the mean temperature of the planet land outside the error bars in the models. What that means is that climate is a complicated thing (not too surprising), and that the models are missing some components. The article wasn't about "Cherry picking" as far as I read it was more along the lines, "Well if all 21 models of the IPCC are inaccurate, what are some of the models they rejected?" That is asking the question, "If we don't have the right answer, what other answers were proposed?" Finding a model that both explains the previous temperatures with the data we have and is more accurately predicting the changes we're observing is the goal.
  - 14y ago
Tycho 14y ago
Have you noticed that no one talks about 3rd world debt these days? Remember Live 8? There seems to be a hierarchy of problems that the public/media keeps track of. 8 Years ago we were all talking about global warming and 3rd world debt. Then the economy crashed. Now we talk about the economy all day, with climate change relegated to occasional page 4 articles when a new study is published. Nobody even mentions 3rd world debt. And that gives you an idea of how likely anyone is to change their behaviour based off the predictions of climate scientists (or even based off actual climate change, given that it happens so slowly).
- unabridged 14y ago
  I don't understand the fascination with 3rd world debt, either the countries keep paying at the detriment to domestic spending or they default and end up with higher interest rates. That is it. These are non-recourse loans, the IMF or World Bank or whoever is not going to invade to get paid back. Debt forgiveness is still default, just more socially accepted. But just like default it will still end with less trust and higher interest.
  - Tycho 14y ago
    Do existing national debt payments and potential higher interest rates for future borrowing have an equilibrium? I mean obviously the former helps keep the latter at bay, but can you really say they are in balance and that it wouldn't be better to simply default on the debt and then borrow less in future? I suppose if more countries got serious about cancelling the debt, there would also start to be talk from charities/activists of guaranteeing future rates.
ramblerman 14y ago
I'm not versed in climatology or environmental science, and frankly neither are most people. The issue of global warming really confuses me to the point that I'm now on the fence. I've seen people with no knowledge on the matter become violent when it is challenged. A typical rebuttal might be "Well the glaciers are disappearing" in the same way christian fundamentalists use one liners to negate evolution. Science shouldn't be emotional, and I find that worrying. --- P.S I have no doubt we are screwing up our environment and need urgent change, but the psychology surrounding global warming is odd and interesting.

64 points by iProject 14y ago

I can't help but wonder why the economist would mention something and then say "This study has not been peer-reviewed." I would assume there are plenty of peer reviewed literature to look at so why did they bother to even read it? Is this something that has revived little research, because people are still assuming it's a short term anomaly? As to energy-balance models's they don't account for the huge difference in average temperatures between the poles and the equator, it takes far less energy to maintain a 3C increase in Alaska than Florida. As such weather patterns are really important.

pav3l 14y ago
"Peer-reviewed" does not mean correct, or vice versa. The study they are talking about was done by the Research Council of Norway. I am assuming the goal was to inform the public, not to get published in a scientific journal. It was not an academic exercise. I, for one, am very happy that the Economist included this study in their survey.
- Retric 14y ago
  The primary advantage to being peer reviewed is to avoid stupid mistakes. That's not to say it's correct, but it's like saying here is my book I did not have anyone proofread it. It could be a great book, but I just had a few red flags pop up. Now, if the goal is to inform the public you base it on some peer reviewed research and repackage that instead of releasing original research in that fashion. All I am saying is the way the economist presented it was odd. I was assuming they where looking for something to create a little controversy to keep things interesting, but it just seemed odd to use something as a reference and then make it seem less credible at the same time.
  - shardling 14y ago
    > I was assuming they where looking for something to create a little controversy to keep things interesting, but it just seemed odd to use something as a reference and then make it seem less credible at the same time. If a report like that is well written, it will provide a decent introduction to the ideas, and also have an exhaustive list of references. In that sense it makes a better reference for a journalist or layman than the original papers, which can be hard to interpret! And you can still go and look at the original sources if you like.
btilly 14y ago
Given how much peer-reviewed research they also referenced that came to similar conclusions, I would assume that it is to make the point that this is an area of currently active research.

crazy1van 14y ago

Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. Clearly it is not as brittle as the typical climate scientist would have us believe.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 14y ago
> Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a [. . .] Because of the wealth of evidence that tells us otherwise. > can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. 'absorbing shocks' and 'supporting life' doesn't mean 'supporting human life comfortably'. I don't understand the outrage about climate change, since reducing co2 emissions is mostly about being more energy efficient. How is that a terrible thing? My parents lived through 'Pea Soupers'[1] (a 4 day fog killed 4,000 people in London); we've seen the effects of gridlock and poor public transport; working on better solutions before the billions of China and India need a gas-guzzling car each doesn't feel like having any downsides. [1] (http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.html http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.h...)
- marknutter 14y ago
  There's nothing wrong with wanting to be energy efficient but when that means telling developing nations like China and India that they are not allowed to burn as many fossil fuels as developed nations did when they were developing you're likely to get some pushback. The only feasible solution to the problem is to find energy sources that produce at or above the levels the world requires today, but does so in a clean way. The only one that comes to mind for me is nuclear power.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    I agree that geo-political realities make any global coordinated attempts to alter real inputs to various climate models unfeasible. As long as people want to see their children grow up to prosper, they won't want to sacrifice for a foreigner's objective. It is the same principle that has caused indolent civilizations to fall to foreign aggressors, the one that doesn't follow the pattern wins. And not everyone will believe the enlightened creed of less is better.

FD3SA 14y ago

We seldom address climate discussions from a perspective of geological timescales [1]. From this, it is clear that life has existed on earth throughout an extreme range of atmospheric conditions. However, it is quite possible that nature's response to these conditions may be severely limited due to human intervention (clear-cutting rain forests, etc.). I hope that in the near future it will be economically advantageous to transition away from fossil fuels. Elon Musk believes this will be the case [2], and I sincerely hope he is correct. Fossil fuels are a non-sustainable energy source which are being rapidly depleted and already cost far more in externalities than we realize (pollution, war, market instability, etc.). Climate change should not be the only impetus for a transition to a sustainable energy infrastructure. 1. http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg 2. http://www.treehugger.com/cars/elon-musk-ted-talk-2013-tesla-spacex-solarcity-and-more.html http://www.treehugger.com/cars/elon-musk-ted-talk-2013-tesla...

vixen99 14y ago
Not my impression. Any denizen of climate sites is rather familiar with a wide range of historical climate graphs created from an amazing number of proxies. My favourite is the analysis based on algae which synthesize a range of saturated and unsaturated fats denpending on the water temperature.
sageikosa 14y ago
Nature doesn't respond to conditions. Evolution isn't a process of intentions; such that we can state: "nature intends" for such-and-such a species to exist/thrive/die, except for the intervention of unnatural events. Nature is conditions, and man is a part of the equation.
- hackinthebochs 14y ago
  This comment is quickly going the way of "correlation doesn't equal causation" style of karma-whoring. It's so overused, and more often than not misplaced, that it's a net negative to the discussion. Yes, evolution doesn't have intentions or goals, but scientists, actual zoologists and evolutionary biologists, speak of "intentions", "goals", etc when speaking of evolutionary processes (just open a Dawkins book). Anthropomorphizing a natural process is a short-hand that allows one to communicate ideas more effectively and more naturally. Everyone knows that there isn't an actual Gaia-like being pulling the strings of nature. Pointing this out is just noise in an otherwise productive conversation.

adventured 14y ago

Currently enjoying a foot of snow in my yard in Spring, with this being the 4th greatest snow fall season in recorded history locally. Yeah I'm a skeptic. Global cooling -> global warming -> global climate change. As the climate fails to heat up as predicted, the names and claims will once again shift.

cgh 14y ago
Climate != weather. This is a pretty basic distinction.
- mason240 14y ago
  Unless it's bad weather. Then it will be used as an anecdote to "prove" AGW (as Hurricane Sandy is).
gmac 14y ago
Which is why the phrase 'climate change' is preferred to 'global warming'. Mean global temperatures will rise, and a key result of this may well be higher variability, with correspondingly more extreme weather events. There is no sense in which a freak snowfall disproves climate change: quite the reverse.
- Shivetya 14y ago
  Granted, but a little over a hundred years ago there were some might fine blizzards not equaled since. I think they key here is, people lost interest when every little thing was declared global warming and then started rolling their eyes when the switch was made to "climate change". Fanaticism has a tendency to cause people to tune out, worse is when its driven to political and financial benefit of a few.
- nice1 14y ago
  Why should mean global temperatures rise? There seems to be no actual evidence for this.
jbooth 14y ago

tokenadult 14y ago

The fossils in the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/03/27/mysteries-of-the-tar-pits/ http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/03/27/mysteries-of-the-tar-p... provide a rich record of a variety of mammal and bird species going through almost 30,000 years of the last glacial-interglacial cycle. What's remarkable about the fossils is the statis in the body forms of the wide variety of animals trapped in the tar pits. Significant climate change resulted in indistinguishable evolutionary change in those animals. As scientists continue to work on predicting the probable effects of future climate changes, looking back on verifiable examples like well dated fossil beds will be helpful in putting bounds on the predictions.

btilly 14y ago
There is nothing remarkable about that. 30,000 years is very short evolutionarily. The best response to climate change in that time frame is migration, not adaptation.
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  30,000 is an evolutionary eternity. The huge variety of bizarre dog breeds was created over a few centuries. Foxes were turned from nigh untameable wild animals into pets in a few decades.
  - jessriedel 14y ago
    That's not evolution, that's selective breeding by humans.
    - agildehaus 14y ago
      Selection is a component of evolution. Human selection is just one type of it, natural being the other. Wolves did evolve into dogs, but not naturally by our definition of "natural".
  - btilly 14y ago
    Yes, 10,000 years is a long enough time to create a whole new species under normal circumstances. Under the forced breeding that people do, it goes even faster. But normally a species is pretty well adapted to its environment and does not have trivially obvious improvements to make, and therefore changes slowly. Therefore the the average mammalian species manages to survive mostly unchanged for about a million years or so (figure shamelessly stolen from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_extinction_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_extinction_rate - and they cite a 1993 study for it). Thus one would expect, on average, that 97% of the mammalian species that were around 30,000 years ago that to still be around and recognizably be the same kind of animal. This is not actually so, and the main reasons are extinction events caused by people, and the effects of domestic breeding on chickens, dogs, carrots, tomatoes, and so on. But outside of types of things created by humans, there aren't a whole lot of new species running around that didn't exist in pretty close to their current form 30,000 years ago. For example there is likely less genetic difference between you and our ancestors 30,000 years ago than there is between you and an Australian aborigine.

guscost 14y ago

Politicians shouldn't be allowed to manipulate the energy industry, period. Questions about the analysis of temperature signals are interesting but often beside the point.

pagekicker 14y ago
And the energy industry shouldn't be allowed to manipulate politicians?
- guscost 14y ago
  Of course, but that doesn't justify corruption.
  - pagekicker 14y ago
    Didn't say that it did.

gmcquillan 14y ago

I don't know that I agree with the thesis of this article whatsoever; basically some cherry-picked research estimates "we may only see 1.5 to 2 degree increases, and we haven't had any real warming in the past 10 years; Therefore, we might want to reevaluate the amount of energy and attention we spend on mitigating carbon emissions" That seems like a pretty flimsy argument. 1. I don't think there's strong evidence that 'global average temperatures stopped increasing.' Many of the world's largest average temperature readings have happened in the last ten years (2010, especially, but even recent reports show upward trends: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/13 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/13). 2. Cherry-picking a few people whose models show a lower than average range, doesn't tell me anything other than the author of this article is suffering from wishful thinking. 3. The heart of the article seems to be suggesting this: "If climate change isn't that bad, maybe we don't have to do anything about it, " but ignores the opposite proposition. Oddly, I'm not even sure why such an article is necessary since the world collectively isn't making any earnest attempts to curb carbon emissions. Any reductions have been economically based, not environmental. No, I think this is a hit piece on the climate change movement couched as due-diligence and beneficial skepticism.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Interesting take on it. I didn't see it as a hit piece so much as a "Hmm, what do we make of this?" piece. The data that the temperature for the last 10 years has remained basically flat is coming from the exact same sources that have advocated awareness of anthropogenic change, the IPCC being one of them. Unless things change a lot we're very much in danger of having the mean temperature of the planet land outside the error bars in the models. What that means is that climate is a complicated thing (not too surprising), and that the models are missing some components. The article wasn't about "Cherry picking" as far as I read it was more along the lines, "Well if all 21 models of the IPCC are inaccurate, what are some of the models they rejected?" That is asking the question, "If we don't have the right answer, what other answers were proposed?" Finding a model that both explains the previous temperatures with the data we have and is more accurately predicting the changes we're observing is the goal.
- 14y ago

Tycho 14y ago

Have you noticed that no one talks about 3rd world debt these days? Remember Live 8? There seems to be a hierarchy of problems that the public/media keeps track of. 8 Years ago we were all talking about global warming and 3rd world debt. Then the economy crashed. Now we talk about the economy all day, with climate change relegated to occasional page 4 articles when a new study is published. Nobody even mentions 3rd world debt. And that gives you an idea of how likely anyone is to change their behaviour based off the predictions of climate scientists (or even based off actual climate change, given that it happens so slowly).

unabridged 14y ago
I don't understand the fascination with 3rd world debt, either the countries keep paying at the detriment to domestic spending or they default and end up with higher interest rates. That is it. These are non-recourse loans, the IMF or World Bank or whoever is not going to invade to get paid back. Debt forgiveness is still default, just more socially accepted. But just like default it will still end with less trust and higher interest.
- Tycho 14y ago
  Do existing national debt payments and potential higher interest rates for future borrowing have an equilibrium? I mean obviously the former helps keep the latter at bay, but can you really say they are in balance and that it wouldn't be better to simply default on the debt and then borrow less in future? I suppose if more countries got serious about cancelling the debt, there would also start to be talk from charities/activists of guaranteeing future rates.

ramblerman 14y ago

I'm not versed in climatology or environmental science, and frankly neither are most people. The issue of global warming really confuses me to the point that I'm now on the fence. I've seen people with no knowledge on the matter become violent when it is challenged. A typical rebuttal might be "Well the glaciers are disappearing" in the same way christian fundamentalists use one liners to negate evolution. Science shouldn't be emotional, and I find that worrying. --- P.S I have no doubt we are screwing up our environment and need urgent change, but the psychology surrounding global warming is odd and interesting.