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Throwing my hat into the ring here: 1) I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on princ

Throwing my hat into the ring here: 1) I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on principle, not just because of the threat of climate change. I think making it about climate change gives too many opportunities for argument derailment. Think about when "tree hugger" was a pejorative term; i mean, who DOESN'T want to hug a tree? I think it's a lot harder for people to argue against the idea of "leave a place as you found it" than to find flaws a data set. It also allows for much broader regulation. For example, we could then start focusing on legislation against pharm manufacturers allowing meds to seep into the water supply rather than just the air pollution they're producing. 2) I'm starting to wonder why we're not focusing more on adaptation to than prevention of climate change. I've been watching a lot of TED talks lately (thanks, Netflix!) about the impact of climate change, and the one that I'm thinking of was a researcher who spent time in the arctic studying the wildlife there, and made the case that we should prevent climate change so that we can save arctic wildlife. But I wonder, if we were alive in the age of dinosaurs, would we be saying that we need to clean up the atmosphere to prevent the impact winter that would inevitably kill them? While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility as humans to tamper with natural processes like extinction. In our prevention efforts, we may also be preventing natural selection and, by extension, adaptation. It could be a reality that we'll face an extinction event that wipes out all other non-domesticated mammalian life. While we can all agree that an Earth like that would suck, we know that, 600 million years from now, EVERYTHING will be wiped out. People speculate that, at this time, humans themselves will either become extinct or will have migrated off the planet. So, my question is, are we prepared to jump ship if Earth becomes uninhabitable? Is it realistic to try to change all 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms of atmosphere, or should we starting thinking about building habitats for space living?

asgard1024 13y ago
> why we're not focusing more on adaptation to than prevention of climate change The reality is that prevention is cheaper (there is also an issue of distribution of the cost, though). Prevention of climate change effectively means not using energy from fossil fuels, while adaptation means paying extra energy cost for each unit of energy you get from fossil fuels. This extra cost is actually greater than extra cost that would be incurred if you used non-fossil fuel source. So if you decide to continue to use fossil fuel sources at all, the total cost (savings due to cheap fuel + mitigation costs) will always be higher than the non-fossil energy sources (higher cost to get the energy but savings on mitigation).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
noiv 13y ago
There are enough gigatons of carbon (oil, coal, methanhydrates) available and ready to burn to render this planet uninhabitable in a time frame of centuries. That's nothing someone can adapt to. We can adapt to +2°C, likely to +4°C and perhaps even to +6°C, but there has to be an upper limit, otherwise you simply keep adapting until you run out of money. Why is it so hard to imagine changing our lifestyle might be the easiest thing to do?
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  The tropics right now are cool enough to live in, right? I have hard time believing even +50°C would render the planet uninhabitable.
  - noiv 13y ago
    You're right Bill Gates and Warren Buffet will survive.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      How about the entirety of Russia? I don't see why it takes being rich to live in a formerly-cold now-hot area. And even people in poverty can migrate. I really don't understand your point.
      - seszett 13y ago
        +50°C ? The areas of Earth where today the temperature never grows beyond, say, -10°C (40°C sounds like close to an upper limit, to me) are quite small. But most importantly... +50°C is survivable ? OK. Then when the temperature reaches +75°C, what do we do ? +100°C ? I'm surprised at how many people seem to think we can simply patch problems from day to day and only do anything short term. It seems extraordinarily short-sighted to me. Building dikes? Sure, building dams for sealevel three meters higher sounds reasonable, right? Oh well, that's what the Netherlands already have? Let's just build a new six-meter dam then, where's the problem? Well, six meters might be doable, but what do we do when 12 meters are needed? 50? 100?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I'm with you on #2. One way to look at this chart is that if we 'correct' all of our input into the system then the system will revert to its previous norm, i.e. we'll plunge into an ice age and glaciers will begin to move south over North America and Europe. On the other hand our ability to 'fine tune' our control is all but impossible on these large scales so "control" of the climate is still beyond our reach. So perhaps investing in keeping old people alive during hot and cold snaps might be a good investment and infrastructure that is impervious to same.
- scarmig 13y ago
  A couple points: 1) CO2 concentration has a long half-life in the atmosphere, so even if we immediately stopped emitting every molecule of fossil fuel-derived CO2 into it, we'd still see the effects of what we've done for the past century for at least another couple centuries. 2) People mostly hope to lower the rate at which our CO2 emissions rate increases, and maybe in certain countries make it negative. Both of those, however, are derivatives of the relevant value for purposes of the greenhouse effect and ocean acidification: the absolute level in the atmosphere. Which has zero chance of decrease even under the most aggressive conceivable prevention efforts. 3) The graph doesn't even cover the last major glaciation event: the last glacial maximum was around 20k years ago. 4) Biggest issue: the people who will be most adversely effected by climate change are people who don't have the resources to adapt. I don't dismiss the idea out of hand that it might be cheaper to put efforts into mitigation than prevention: we're definitely going to have to do some mitigation work. But you are not going to convince Western countries to spend trillions of dollars building levees in Bangladesh.
mtts 13y ago
Your #2 reminds me of something Bjorn Lomborg (yeah yeah, I'm not a fan either - nor a hater, in fact, I just don't know enough about the nuances of the issues involved to have an opinion that's well thought out enough to defend) said in an interview on Dutch television years ago. He said the money spent on implementing Kyoto was much better spent combating the direct effects of global warming, for example by building dikes in areas that were too poor to build them themselves and that were likely to be affected by rising sea levels, like Bangladesh. To my layman's ears, that sounded quite reasonable. It still does, in fact.
- scarmig 13y ago
  How do you fairly raise those revenues that'd fund the trillions of dollars worth of mitigation efforts? People who disproportionately generate CO2 emissions are disproportionately responsible for the need for mitigation efforts. So Lomborg's argument isn't so much against putting a Pigouvian tax on carbon emissions, as it is earmarking the revenues derived from those emissions for mitigation efforts instead of using it to pay down deficits or pay for other services. Which is certainly something I can agree with, but it seems politically implausible. First lets get a carbon tax.
  - mtts 13y ago
    Learned something today. Thanks. Didn't know what a "Pigouvian tax" was. Somewhat more on topic: in the interview I saw Lomborg didn't talk about earmarking or anything like that, he merely said the money would be better spent elsewhere. Maybe a carbon tax would indeed be the best way to go about collecting the money, come to think of it. "Want to pollute? Fine. Just pay up for the 'Dikes for Bangladesh' fund first."
gugol 13y ago
"Thanks, Netflix"? www.ted.com
stinos 13y ago
I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on principle That's definitely a must. But I'm not sure if it's doable, seeing the global population just keeps on growing: as long as industry is destructive and always more of it is needed, the net result still is destructive. Might sound bold, but a lot of problems would be solved by combining clean industry with a _lot_ less people to serve.
quadrangle 13y ago
What's with thanking Netflix for TED talks??? They are available anyway at TED.com anyway or other places, given their Creative Commons license…
- jaredmcateer 13y ago
  I think he's thanking netflix for making them easily available and discoverable to him.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  Oh, I know. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor
sliverstorm 13y ago
While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility as humans to tamper with natural processes like extinction. The fundamental premise is not that extinction is bad, but that extinction we cause is bad. If a fox tramples your neighbor's garden, that's too bad. If you trample your neighbor's garden, you should fix it.
- iopq 13y ago
  I'd like mosquitoes to go extinct. Why would that be bad?
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    This is where we delve into questions of whether we can understand the impact of our actions. Mosquitoes actually underpin a great number of relationships in nature. Most people have largely cast aside the question of whether it is ethical because of how much harm mosquitoes cause to humans, but there remains that sticky question of what happens to the ecosystems when they are gone. Also, before someone posts a link to "that" article, let me say in advance it was written by an intern based on interviews that (in my opinion) suggest exactly the opposite of what the writer concludes.
  - heme 13y ago
    Mosquitoes help pollinate blueberries. Without blueberries we have nothing to anti the oxidants.
  - oinksoft 13y ago
    It would be very bad. Birds and small fish hugely depend on mosquitoes for their diets. Ticks are another matter. While birds will eat them, no species that I know of depends on them for its diet. We probably can safely eradicate ticks.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  I used to agree completely with you, but now I realize that, given the second law of thermodynamics, it's impossible to restore an entire ecosystem back to a previous state. From what I hear, one goal of ending climate change is to allow icecaps to re-form and to last longer throughout the year, which ostensibly will end the suffering of polar bears "stranded" at sea. However, even if we did remove all excess amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (which, as of today, is something that's barely discussed seriously), it's not going to suddenly reverse the adapted behavior of polar bears. This is a totally hypothetical and unscientific story, but let's pretend that the ice caps melted such that polar bears were forced inland and began foraging for food in human-populated areas. In response, the government of Canada single-handedly puts up the money to remove all excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Over a period of decades, the ice grows back, but: do we really expect the polar bear population, which has now adapted to foraging for garbage, to suddenly move back to their initial habitat? Chances are, food will be more plentiful for them in a human-populated area. Now let's assume that polar bears play a significant role in seal population control. Well, now that the polar bears have adapted and are now living further inland, the seal population booms in the arctic region. In fact, it gets so big, that now penguin populations are in rapid decline! So, at this point, we've spent probably trillions of dollars, haven't really helped the polar bears at all, and have directly contributed to the endangerment of penguins. And this is all assuming that our plan even works! Not to mention the fact that there may be other species that died off that played a huge impact on balancing the ice-filled arctic ecosystem. So, given that scenario, I think the better question to ask is, what benefit would we, as humans, get from a return to a cooler Earth? IMO wildlife will take care of itself: adapt, die off, etc. the same way it always has. BUT, I think that too often the focus is put on sad-looking animals and melted snowcaps, which makes it seem like global warming is just an "environmentalist" issue rather than a serious threat to human life.
microcolonel 13y ago
Notice how abused land is mostly not privately owned by its abusers. Clear cutters are given lumber rights temporarily, but since they don't own the lot, they gain nothing from replanting and controlled burning. Another great asset of private ownership is the inherent drive toward efficiency, which has been great as far as environmental impact reduction goes.
dredmorbius 13y ago
While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility Two points: 1. The conditions on Earth which support other megafauna also, largely, are beneficial to humans. Change those conditions and it's likely that the extinctions aren't so much bad for humans as indicators of changing conditions which are bad for humans. 2. Conservation biologists have recognized that the Earth and its biosphere isn't a static system, and that conservation efforts shouldn't be aimed at "holding back the tides" so to speak. But noting when changes are happening at scales which are likely to have strongly negative impacts for humans, civilization, and the almighty economy, and deciding to take preemptive action, could be a very good thing. There's a huge difference between wiping out all life (or much of it) within the next 200 years, and the next 800 million. Assuming you've got an 85 year lifespan, that's the difference between living for your full life, or just 25 minutes. My own definition of "sustainability" is "so long as the extrinsic conditions are conducive to human survival". Even with genetic drift, that's likely a few millions to tens of millions of years.
beedogs 13y ago
How on earth is this ludicrous wall of text the top comment? "We should look into moving into outer space once we've destroyed the planet" -- are you for real?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

asgard1024 13y ago

> why we're not focusing more on adaptation to than prevention of climate change The reality is that prevention is cheaper (there is also an issue of distribution of the cost, though). Prevention of climate change effectively means not using energy from fossil fuels, while adaptation means paying extra energy cost for each unit of energy you get from fossil fuels. This extra cost is actually greater than extra cost that would be incurred if you used non-fossil fuel source. So if you decide to continue to use fossil fuel sources at all, the total cost (savings due to cheap fuel + mitigation costs) will always be higher than the non-fossil energy sources (higher cost to get the energy but savings on mitigation).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

noiv 13y ago

There are enough gigatons of carbon (oil, coal, methanhydrates) available and ready to burn to render this planet uninhabitable in a time frame of centuries. That's nothing someone can adapt to. We can adapt to +2°C, likely to +4°C and perhaps even to +6°C, but there has to be an upper limit, otherwise you simply keep adapting until you run out of money. Why is it so hard to imagine changing our lifestyle might be the easiest thing to do?

Dylan16807 13y ago
The tropics right now are cool enough to live in, right? I have hard time believing even +50°C would render the planet uninhabitable.
- noiv 13y ago
  You're right Bill Gates and Warren Buffet will survive.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    How about the entirety of Russia? I don't see why it takes being rich to live in a formerly-cold now-hot area. And even people in poverty can migrate. I really don't understand your point.
    - seszett 13y ago
      +50°C ? The areas of Earth where today the temperature never grows beyond, say, -10°C (40°C sounds like close to an upper limit, to me) are quite small. But most importantly... +50°C is survivable ? OK. Then when the temperature reaches +75°C, what do we do ? +100°C ? I'm surprised at how many people seem to think we can simply patch problems from day to day and only do anything short term. It seems extraordinarily short-sighted to me. Building dikes? Sure, building dams for sealevel three meters higher sounds reasonable, right? Oh well, that's what the Netherlands already have? Let's just build a new six-meter dam then, where's the problem? Well, six meters might be doable, but what do we do when 12 meters are needed? 50? 100?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I'm with you on #2. One way to look at this chart is that if we 'correct' all of our input into the system then the system will revert to its previous norm, i.e. we'll plunge into an ice age and glaciers will begin to move south over North America and Europe. On the other hand our ability to 'fine tune' our control is all but impossible on these large scales so "control" of the climate is still beyond our reach. So perhaps investing in keeping old people alive during hot and cold snaps might be a good investment and infrastructure that is impervious to same.

scarmig 13y ago
A couple points: 1) CO2 concentration has a long half-life in the atmosphere, so even if we immediately stopped emitting every molecule of fossil fuel-derived CO2 into it, we'd still see the effects of what we've done for the past century for at least another couple centuries. 2) People mostly hope to lower the rate at which our CO2 emissions rate increases, and maybe in certain countries make it negative. Both of those, however, are derivatives of the relevant value for purposes of the greenhouse effect and ocean acidification: the absolute level in the atmosphere. Which has zero chance of decrease even under the most aggressive conceivable prevention efforts. 3) The graph doesn't even cover the last major glaciation event: the last glacial maximum was around 20k years ago. 4) Biggest issue: the people who will be most adversely effected by climate change are people who don't have the resources to adapt. I don't dismiss the idea out of hand that it might be cheaper to put efforts into mitigation than prevention: we're definitely going to have to do some mitigation work. But you are not going to convince Western countries to spend trillions of dollars building levees in Bangladesh.

mtts 13y ago

Your #2 reminds me of something Bjorn Lomborg (yeah yeah, I'm not a fan either - nor a hater, in fact, I just don't know enough about the nuances of the issues involved to have an opinion that's well thought out enough to defend) said in an interview on Dutch television years ago. He said the money spent on implementing Kyoto was much better spent combating the direct effects of global warming, for example by building dikes in areas that were too poor to build them themselves and that were likely to be affected by rising sea levels, like Bangladesh. To my layman's ears, that sounded quite reasonable. It still does, in fact.

scarmig 13y ago
How do you fairly raise those revenues that'd fund the trillions of dollars worth of mitigation efforts? People who disproportionately generate CO2 emissions are disproportionately responsible for the need for mitigation efforts. So Lomborg's argument isn't so much against putting a Pigouvian tax on carbon emissions, as it is earmarking the revenues derived from those emissions for mitigation efforts instead of using it to pay down deficits or pay for other services. Which is certainly something I can agree with, but it seems politically implausible. First lets get a carbon tax.
- mtts 13y ago
  Learned something today. Thanks. Didn't know what a "Pigouvian tax" was. Somewhat more on topic: in the interview I saw Lomborg didn't talk about earmarking or anything like that, he merely said the money would be better spent elsewhere. Maybe a carbon tax would indeed be the best way to go about collecting the money, come to think of it. "Want to pollute? Fine. Just pay up for the 'Dikes for Bangladesh' fund first."

gugol 13y ago

"Thanks, Netflix"? www.ted.com

stinos 13y ago

I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on principle That's definitely a must. But I'm not sure if it's doable, seeing the global population just keeps on growing: as long as industry is destructive and always more of it is needed, the net result still is destructive. Might sound bold, but a lot of problems would be solved by combining clean industry with a _lot_ less people to serve.

quadrangle 13y ago

What's with thanking Netflix for TED talks??? They are available anyway at TED.com anyway or other places, given their Creative Commons license…

jaredmcateer 13y ago
I think he's thanking netflix for making them easily available and discoverable to him.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
Oh, I know. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor

sliverstorm 13y ago

While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility as humans to tamper with natural processes like extinction. The fundamental premise is not that extinction is bad, but that extinction we cause is bad. If a fox tramples your neighbor's garden, that's too bad. If you trample your neighbor's garden, you should fix it.

iopq 13y ago
I'd like mosquitoes to go extinct. Why would that be bad?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  This is where we delve into questions of whether we can understand the impact of our actions. Mosquitoes actually underpin a great number of relationships in nature. Most people have largely cast aside the question of whether it is ethical because of how much harm mosquitoes cause to humans, but there remains that sticky question of what happens to the ecosystems when they are gone. Also, before someone posts a link to "that" article, let me say in advance it was written by an intern based on interviews that (in my opinion) suggest exactly the opposite of what the writer concludes.
- heme 13y ago
  Mosquitoes help pollinate blueberries. Without blueberries we have nothing to anti the oxidants.
- oinksoft 13y ago
  It would be very bad. Birds and small fish hugely depend on mosquitoes for their diets. Ticks are another matter. While birds will eat them, no species that I know of depends on them for its diet. We probably can safely eradicate ticks.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
I used to agree completely with you, but now I realize that, given the second law of thermodynamics, it's impossible to restore an entire ecosystem back to a previous state. From what I hear, one goal of ending climate change is to allow icecaps to re-form and to last longer throughout the year, which ostensibly will end the suffering of polar bears "stranded" at sea. However, even if we did remove all excess amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (which, as of today, is something that's barely discussed seriously), it's not going to suddenly reverse the adapted behavior of polar bears. This is a totally hypothetical and unscientific story, but let's pretend that the ice caps melted such that polar bears were forced inland and began foraging for food in human-populated areas. In response, the government of Canada single-handedly puts up the money to remove all excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Over a period of decades, the ice grows back, but: do we really expect the polar bear population, which has now adapted to foraging for garbage, to suddenly move back to their initial habitat? Chances are, food will be more plentiful for them in a human-populated area. Now let's assume that polar bears play a significant role in seal population control. Well, now that the polar bears have adapted and are now living further inland, the seal population booms in the arctic region. In fact, it gets so big, that now penguin populations are in rapid decline! So, at this point, we've spent probably trillions of dollars, haven't really helped the polar bears at all, and have directly contributed to the endangerment of penguins. And this is all assuming that our plan even works! Not to mention the fact that there may be other species that died off that played a huge impact on balancing the ice-filled arctic ecosystem. So, given that scenario, I think the better question to ask is, what benefit would we, as humans, get from a return to a cooler Earth? IMO wildlife will take care of itself: adapt, die off, etc. the same way it always has. BUT, I think that too often the focus is put on sad-looking animals and melted snowcaps, which makes it seem like global warming is just an "environmentalist" issue rather than a serious threat to human life.

microcolonel 13y ago

Notice how abused land is mostly not privately owned by its abusers. Clear cutters are given lumber rights temporarily, but since they don't own the lot, they gain nothing from replanting and controlled burning. Another great asset of private ownership is the inherent drive toward efficiency, which has been great as far as environmental impact reduction goes.

dredmorbius 13y ago

While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility Two points: 1. The conditions on Earth which support other megafauna also, largely, are beneficial to humans. Change those conditions and it's likely that the extinctions aren't so much bad for humans as indicators of changing conditions which are bad for humans. 2. Conservation biologists have recognized that the Earth and its biosphere isn't a static system, and that conservation efforts shouldn't be aimed at "holding back the tides" so to speak. But noting when changes are happening at scales which are likely to have strongly negative impacts for humans, civilization, and the almighty economy, and deciding to take preemptive action, could be a very good thing. There's a huge difference between wiping out all life (or much of it) within the next 200 years, and the next 800 million. Assuming you've got an 85 year lifespan, that's the difference between living for your full life, or just 25 minutes. My own definition of "sustainability" is "so long as the extrinsic conditions are conducive to human survival". Even with genetic drift, that's likely a few millions to tens of millions of years.

beedogs 13y ago

How on earth is this ludicrous wall of text the top comment? "We should look into moving into outer space once we've destroyed the planet" -- are you for real?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]