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I don't understand the emphasis on 'global warming' / 'climate change' as a marquee issue to drive action on environmental protection. The science behind it se

by pmorici 13y ago

I don't understand the emphasis on 'global warming' / 'climate change' as a marquee issue to drive action on environmental protection. The science behind it seems complex and because it relies so heavily on modeling leaves significant uncertainty in the mind of any lay person that reads about this stuff. I would think a much better way to promote environmental protection would be from the human health angle. Things like Erin Broncovich, Gas Land, (or whatever the air pollution equivalent is) etc... where there is clear documented proof about how environmental contamination is literally killing people. Seems like those would be more compelling reasons to act than some uncertain doom a century from now.

eli 13y ago
But they're different issues, right? The actions I would take to ensure my drinking water doesn't give me cancer are often different from those I'd take to prevent rising sea levels.
- pmorici 13y ago
  Sorry those might have been bad examples. It's well documented that air pollution also causes human health issues. I'm saying that might be a better thing to highlight than the fact that that same air pollution might cause the tide to rise some unknown amount at some uncertain date in the future.
- pyre 13y ago
  - Air pollution causes acid rain. - Nobody likes "smog alert" days in large cities (LA, NYC, Toronto, etc). Everyone agrees that breathing in smog is bad. - Burning coal releases radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. - Air pollution causes ocean acidification. This has the potential to wipe out entire species / aquatic ecosystems. - Ocean dead zones are bad. Stop producing - Significant amounts of methane come from 'cow farts.' Farming livestock for food makes less sense than farming plants. It takes more farmland to support livestock (e.g. something like 1000 lbs plants to produce 100 lbs of meat). [Not to mention all of the freshwater issues with irrigating all of the extra land used to feed the livestock.] - Deforestation of topic rain forests in Indonesia need to stop because they are destroying Orangutan habitat, causing a possible extinction (except for those in captivity / zoos). - Deforestation of the Amazon to make way for farmland / livestock grazing area needs to stop. It contributes a signification portion of the oxygen that we breath to the atmosphere.
  - TausAmmer 13y ago
    Then we asap need to invent replicators. Because I work in fine job I need several people to support my lifestyle, so easiest is to find short term solution, burning something to return heat. Meat should go back to premium status, grass fed cattle that eats and shits on same field, in that way no need to grow huge fields of corn that needs to be sprayed with poison and fed with manufactured manure. Hemp for paper and fiber, absorbs your CO2 in huge amounts and needs no pesticide, can be used as to feed livestock in moderate amount of farms, worked well some time ago for farmers, until was forcibly taken out. There is plenty of solutions that would be wonderful, but are you ready to go from your luxurious lifestyle to dry toilet and washing yourself once a week? Sometimes I think it has nothing to do with our advancement in technology but loss of respect to each other.
    - pyre 13y ago
      | Meat should go back to premium status It's funny that so many people don't realize this fact. People nowadays act like throughout the entirety of human history we've eaten nothing but meat, and people that choose to be vegetarian or vegan are somehow 'unnatural' because eating hamburgers, and steaks 365 days a year is the natural state of human being.
DanBC 13y ago
> leaves significant uncertainty in the mind of any lay person that reads about this stuff. Unfortunately that uncertainty is almost entirely created FUD from paid staff - the same people who worked for years to protect tobacco from science.
- pyre 13y ago
  Like how all of our models of the universe were confirmed by probes like Voyager 1, and we learned nothing new. You're right. Models have no uncertainty (and scientists are always expert statisticians, while we're at it ;). I'll at least say that the politicization of the issue hasn't helped the media to accurately report things about global warming.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    There's a big difference between scientists calmly discussing problems with models and the paid shills of various companies who spread lies about the science. There's no doubt that some people are paid by corporations to distort the truth, and that some of those people are using similar tactics to the ones used during tobacco discussions. Your comment is true, but not particularly relevant to the "lay person" that parent comment was talking about. Scientists making mistakes with statistics is bad, but paid scientists deliberately distorting the statistics is worse, and it's those people who manage to get their tripe in op-ed piece in mainstream media.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    It's important to put out that the politicization wasn't two sided: it neither started political nor is inherently political, but was made political by a campaign of disinformation by corrupting special interests. Of course, now that politicization does exist, and that corruption has worsened the quality of discourse among legitimate scientists. They're still functioning decently, but it'd be nice to know how to build a stronger scientific ecosystem.
    - pyre 13y ago
      | politicization wasn't two sided Maybe at the start, but nowadays there are plenty of people on the opposite end of the spectrum spewing things like: - Hurricane Katrina is proof of Global Warming. - "There wasn't enough snow last winter. Global Warming!" - "There was more snow this year than last year. Global Warming!" - "There was a drought this year. Global Warming!" - "There was too much rain this year. Global Warming!" There's also this idea that the climate has ever reached any sort of equilibrium state. With as many variables go into something like the global climate, I find it hard to believe that we can say anything with any certainty. E.g. How do deep sea methane pockets affect the climate? Do we know how often any of these might be released into the atmosphere? Do we know if any of these had any affect on any sort of ancient climate change that we only know about from ice core samples?
saalweachter 13y ago
There's a closely related issue which is much more concrete: ocean acidification. While you can argue that the effects of CO2 on global temperature are hard to understand and model correctly, CO2 leading to ocean acidification is straight forward high school chemistry (not that most of us did that great in high school chemistry). As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere goes up, so must the concentration of CO2 in the oceans. As the concentration of CO2 goes up in the oceans, the oceans become more acidic. You can calculate the exact increase using a couple of formulas from high school chemistry. No computer models or anything.
akjj 13y ago
> The science behind it seems complex and because it relies so heavily on modeling The thing is that you don't require complex modeling to get global warming. Energy comes to the earth from the sun. Energy's radiated out to space as infrared. Carbon dioxide blocks infrared and so increases the temperature. As with everything, you can construct more accurate and more complicated models, but it's a myth that global warming only shows up as a consequence of the complexity. People had to start studying climate change for some reason, right? They did back of the envelope calculations first and then brought in the complicated models to try to quantify exactly the amount of climate change and what its effects would be. Don't get me wrong, climate change has two big things working against it: the effects will not be observed directly for decades, and there's a lot of money from oil and gas which is fighting any attempts to take action. The former means that the evidence is based on modeling and the latter does everything it can to cast doubt on the models.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  But what happens as a result of the increased heat and CO2? Does it lead to improved conditions for some plankton that causes the ocean to become more reflective of heat? Does it lead to some other gas being released that makes the atmosphere more reflactive? Does it accelerate the water cycle leading to increased cloud coverage, making Earth more reflective? Does it lead to the ice sheets melting causing the surface of the Earth to be less reflective. Does it free methane trapped withing the melting ice, increasing the greenhouse effect? Has the politicization nature of the environmental movement made finding good science difficult and a skeptical public justified? But, even given that the average temperature is increasing, what are the effects of that?
benjamincburns 13y ago
Yes. Although sadly I think we live in a world where you might get more effect by promoting the financial angle. I think the simplest argument anyone can make is that if you can do X or produce Y while consuming less energy than your competition, you'll come out ahead. If the entire world focused on this as a primary basis for long term competitive strategy, I think a ton of environmental issues would fall in line. Either way, you're absolutely right. From a marketing standpoint, global warming is such a bad angle from which to promote environmental action.
- clarkmoody 13y ago
  I believe the President has already pivoted to "carbon pollution" in his latest speeches. I do believe that we need much more scientific inquiry before making radical economic policy shifts. In just 40 years (since the 70s), the environmental lobby has been pushing: global cooling global warming climate change And now it's "carbon pollution." I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to extrapolating historical record findings into the future, especially when politics is involved. But the most compelling figure for me, concerning environmental protection, is the annual consumption of grain by livestock. A 1997 article[1] quotes a figure of 800 million people fed with the grain we are feeding livestock in America. So reducing meat consumption would save the energy used to produce the cattle but also the energy used to grow the grain to feed them. It might also make us healthier, saving healthcare costs, but that is less settled than the figures for cattle grain consumption. [1] http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-mi...
mtdewcmu 13y ago
I find peak oil to be the most chilling prospect of all. Global warming, even in the worst scenarios, doesn't predict anything dramatic in the next 50 years.
redwood 13y ago
Absolutely but keep in mind that CO2 has no direct detriment to health and as such has never been the focus of environmental movements... In deciding "do we move from coal to natural gas" power plants: it's clear the immediate health benefits are immense. But the CO2 benefits are less significant... and as a result we should evaluate other options... or view natural gas as a sort of bridge tech. Anyway you're right tho: the focus on CO2 can be a distraction ESPECIALLY in the developing world where toxic pollution is released into children's air/water constantly. We have a luxury, in the developed world, to see CO2 as the more significant threat. Having spent the last year in Bangladesh (and admittedly a country that will be significantly impacted by climate change) I felt the focus on CO2 was completely misplaced. That country is toxic to its citizens in a number of ways and those problems should absolutely be higher priority to fix. The greatest hypocrisy of all is when the wealthy western nations argue that the developing countries should develop green. Sure, they should try to be green where it makes sense. But IF getting themselves out of the toxic rut they're in fastest requires fossil fuels (as we ourselves did) then it's complete insanity to suggest they not use the best tool at their disposal to do so.

by pmorici 13y ago

eli 13y ago

But they're different issues, right? The actions I would take to ensure my drinking water doesn't give me cancer are often different from those I'd take to prevent rising sea levels.

pmorici 13y ago
Sorry those might have been bad examples. It's well documented that air pollution also causes human health issues. I'm saying that might be a better thing to highlight than the fact that that same air pollution might cause the tide to rise some unknown amount at some uncertain date in the future.
pyre 13y ago
- Air pollution causes acid rain. - Nobody likes "smog alert" days in large cities (LA, NYC, Toronto, etc). Everyone agrees that breathing in smog is bad. - Burning coal releases radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. - Air pollution causes ocean acidification. This has the potential to wipe out entire species / aquatic ecosystems. - Ocean dead zones are bad. Stop producing - Significant amounts of methane come from 'cow farts.' Farming livestock for food makes less sense than farming plants. It takes more farmland to support livestock (e.g. something like 1000 lbs plants to produce 100 lbs of meat). [Not to mention all of the freshwater issues with irrigating all of the extra land used to feed the livestock.] - Deforestation of topic rain forests in Indonesia need to stop because they are destroying Orangutan habitat, causing a possible extinction (except for those in captivity / zoos). - Deforestation of the Amazon to make way for farmland / livestock grazing area needs to stop. It contributes a signification portion of the oxygen that we breath to the atmosphere.
- TausAmmer 13y ago
  Then we asap need to invent replicators. Because I work in fine job I need several people to support my lifestyle, so easiest is to find short term solution, burning something to return heat. Meat should go back to premium status, grass fed cattle that eats and shits on same field, in that way no need to grow huge fields of corn that needs to be sprayed with poison and fed with manufactured manure. Hemp for paper and fiber, absorbs your CO2 in huge amounts and needs no pesticide, can be used as to feed livestock in moderate amount of farms, worked well some time ago for farmers, until was forcibly taken out. There is plenty of solutions that would be wonderful, but are you ready to go from your luxurious lifestyle to dry toilet and washing yourself once a week? Sometimes I think it has nothing to do with our advancement in technology but loss of respect to each other.
  - pyre 13y ago
    | Meat should go back to premium status It's funny that so many people don't realize this fact. People nowadays act like throughout the entirety of human history we've eaten nothing but meat, and people that choose to be vegetarian or vegan are somehow 'unnatural' because eating hamburgers, and steaks 365 days a year is the natural state of human being.

DanBC 13y ago

> leaves significant uncertainty in the mind of any lay person that reads about this stuff. Unfortunately that uncertainty is almost entirely created FUD from paid staff - the same people who worked for years to protect tobacco from science.

pyre 13y ago
Like how all of our models of the universe were confirmed by probes like Voyager 1, and we learned nothing new. You're right. Models have no uncertainty (and scientists are always expert statisticians, while we're at it ;). I'll at least say that the politicization of the issue hasn't helped the media to accurately report things about global warming.
- DanBC 13y ago
  There's a big difference between scientists calmly discussing problems with models and the paid shills of various companies who spread lies about the science. There's no doubt that some people are paid by corporations to distort the truth, and that some of those people are using similar tactics to the ones used during tobacco discussions. Your comment is true, but not particularly relevant to the "lay person" that parent comment was talking about. Scientists making mistakes with statistics is bad, but paid scientists deliberately distorting the statistics is worse, and it's those people who manage to get their tripe in op-ed piece in mainstream media.
- scarmig 13y ago
  It's important to put out that the politicization wasn't two sided: it neither started political nor is inherently political, but was made political by a campaign of disinformation by corrupting special interests. Of course, now that politicization does exist, and that corruption has worsened the quality of discourse among legitimate scientists. They're still functioning decently, but it'd be nice to know how to build a stronger scientific ecosystem.
  - pyre 13y ago
    | politicization wasn't two sided Maybe at the start, but nowadays there are plenty of people on the opposite end of the spectrum spewing things like: - Hurricane Katrina is proof of Global Warming. - "There wasn't enough snow last winter. Global Warming!" - "There was more snow this year than last year. Global Warming!" - "There was a drought this year. Global Warming!" - "There was too much rain this year. Global Warming!" There's also this idea that the climate has ever reached any sort of equilibrium state. With as many variables go into something like the global climate, I find it hard to believe that we can say anything with any certainty. E.g. How do deep sea methane pockets affect the climate? Do we know how often any of these might be released into the atmosphere? Do we know if any of these had any affect on any sort of ancient climate change that we only know about from ice core samples?

saalweachter 13y ago

There's a closely related issue which is much more concrete: ocean acidification. While you can argue that the effects of CO2 on global temperature are hard to understand and model correctly, CO2 leading to ocean acidification is straight forward high school chemistry (not that most of us did that great in high school chemistry). As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere goes up, so must the concentration of CO2 in the oceans. As the concentration of CO2 goes up in the oceans, the oceans become more acidic. You can calculate the exact increase using a couple of formulas from high school chemistry. No computer models or anything.

akjj 13y ago

> The science behind it seems complex and because it relies so heavily on modeling The thing is that you don't require complex modeling to get global warming. Energy comes to the earth from the sun. Energy's radiated out to space as infrared. Carbon dioxide blocks infrared and so increases the temperature. As with everything, you can construct more accurate and more complicated models, but it's a myth that global warming only shows up as a consequence of the complexity. People had to start studying climate change for some reason, right? They did back of the envelope calculations first and then brought in the complicated models to try to quantify exactly the amount of climate change and what its effects would be. Don't get me wrong, climate change has two big things working against it: the effects will not be observed directly for decades, and there's a lot of money from oil and gas which is fighting any attempts to take action. The former means that the evidence is based on modeling and the latter does everything it can to cast doubt on the models.

gizmo686 13y ago
But what happens as a result of the increased heat and CO2? Does it lead to improved conditions for some plankton that causes the ocean to become more reflective of heat? Does it lead to some other gas being released that makes the atmosphere more reflactive? Does it accelerate the water cycle leading to increased cloud coverage, making Earth more reflective? Does it lead to the ice sheets melting causing the surface of the Earth to be less reflective. Does it free methane trapped withing the melting ice, increasing the greenhouse effect? Has the politicization nature of the environmental movement made finding good science difficult and a skeptical public justified? But, even given that the average temperature is increasing, what are the effects of that?

benjamincburns 13y ago

Yes. Although sadly I think we live in a world where you might get more effect by promoting the financial angle. I think the simplest argument anyone can make is that if you can do X or produce Y while consuming less energy than your competition, you'll come out ahead. If the entire world focused on this as a primary basis for long term competitive strategy, I think a ton of environmental issues would fall in line. Either way, you're absolutely right. From a marketing standpoint, global warming is such a bad angle from which to promote environmental action.

clarkmoody 13y ago
I believe the President has already pivoted to "carbon pollution" in his latest speeches. I do believe that we need much more scientific inquiry before making radical economic policy shifts. In just 40 years (since the 70s), the environmental lobby has been pushing: global cooling global warming climate change And now it's "carbon pollution." I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to extrapolating historical record findings into the future, especially when politics is involved. But the most compelling figure for me, concerning environmental protection, is the annual consumption of grain by livestock. A 1997 article[1] quotes a figure of 800 million people fed with the grain we are feeding livestock in America. So reducing meat consumption would save the energy used to produce the cattle but also the energy used to grow the grain to feed them. It might also make us healthier, saving healthcare costs, but that is less settled than the figures for cattle grain consumption. [1] http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-mi...

mtdewcmu 13y ago

I find peak oil to be the most chilling prospect of all. Global warming, even in the worst scenarios, doesn't predict anything dramatic in the next 50 years.

redwood 13y ago

Absolutely but keep in mind that CO2 has no direct detriment to health and as such has never been the focus of environmental movements... In deciding "do we move from coal to natural gas" power plants: it's clear the immediate health benefits are immense. But the CO2 benefits are less significant... and as a result we should evaluate other options... or view natural gas as a sort of bridge tech. Anyway you're right tho: the focus on CO2 can be a distraction ESPECIALLY in the developing world where toxic pollution is released into children's air/water constantly. We have a luxury, in the developed world, to see CO2 as the more significant threat. Having spent the last year in Bangladesh (and admittedly a country that will be significantly impacted by climate change) I felt the focus on CO2 was completely misplaced. That country is toxic to its citizens in a number of ways and those problems should absolutely be higher priority to fix. The greatest hypocrisy of all is when the wealthy western nations argue that the developing countries should develop green. Sure, they should try to be green where it makes sense. But IF getting themselves out of the toxic rut they're in fastest requires fossil fuels (as we ourselves did) then it's complete insanity to suggest they not use the best tool at their disposal to do so.