20 ms·

Famous Climate Scientist Issues Sea Level Warning

67 points by nkurz 11y ago

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
It's a pretty jarring revelation. Just two weeks ago, we were skating on the Thames: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11733369/Earth-heading-for-mini-ice-age-within-15-years.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11733369/Earth-headi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869499
- hartror 11y ago
  That was junk reporting. > not predicting a 60 percent drop in the light and heat emitted by the Sun, but a drop in magnetic activity in the Sun. This has only a marginal effect on the Sun’s light/heat output. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/07/14/global_cooling_no_were_not_headed_for_a_mini_ice_age.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/07/14/global_c...
  - mturmon 11y ago
    Phil Plait, who does the Bad Astronomy blog, did a well-calibrated and respectful job with that piece. Phil is well hooked in to the solar community, so he is a good person to be consulting. Thanks for linking to it. Basically, the uproar was caused by a very speculative theory [1] that solar magnetic activity might be decreasing in the coming decades. This concept is not well-established; in fact, it is better-described as a highly speculative theory coming from a data extrapolation by a very small group of solar researchers, at one institution, over the last year or so. But even if their solar claims turn out to be true -- very big if given their methodology -- they (A) can't (and don't) link their magnetic claims to irradiance, and (B) the irradiance effect of sunspot/magnetic change is strongly believed to be quite small relative to other effects anyway, especially anthropogenic ones. [1] It was published in ApJ, but here is a relatively open link: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266799418_PREDICTION_OF_SOLAR_ACTIVITY_FROM_SOLAR_BACKGROUND_MAGNETIC_FIELD_VARIATIONS_IN_CYCLES_21-23 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266799418_PREDICTION...
- jakub_h 11y ago
  That "mini-ice-age" claim has been very quickly questioned by many. But the Gulf Stream reportedly exhibits strong signs of slowing down, which to me sounds like a much more important factor for the UK.
- calinet6 11y ago
  The complexity of climate patterns doesn't preclude both happening at once.
- rosser 11y ago
  And if their predicted worst-case scenario plays out, you'll probably be skating on the Thames again. It will just be a bit wider. Weather != climate.
- 11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
  ^^^ sarcasm ^^^
stvswn 11y ago
Not trying to be a skeptic for its own sake, but its worth noting that, buried deep in the article, you can find reference to an "unorthodox publishing practice" -- it hasn't yet been peer reviewed.
- in_cahoots 11y ago
  Apparently their results are too urgent to be peer-reviewed. The cynic in me wonders why they couldn't put it up on the ArXiv while waiting for the peer review process to run its course. As a layperson I don't know what I'm supposed to make of these results. It looks like a bunch of prestigious authors held a press conference to convince non-specialist reporters that the end of civilization is a distinct possibility. But I know from my own research that you can convince the general public of anything as long as you can give a good presentation. Famous names and bold statements don't necessarily equal good science.
  - 001sky 11y ago
    "Too urgent to be peer-reviewed" Maybe the sixteen co-authors could have...oh, wait what?
    - in_cahoots 11y ago
      I'm not sure if you are agreeing with me or being sarcastic, but the number of coauthors is not indicative of a broader consensus. I've published many papers with 20 or 30 coauthors - a handful of famous professors from one or two schools / modes of thought, and a bunch of postdocs, researchers, and grad students. We still had to go through peer review. The thing you have to remember is that this is all speculation. If they're right, 16 authors can say they were the founders of a new model. If they're wrong... Well there's always another model to publish. The fact that a bunch of friends and colleagues can agree on something doesn't mean there is a wider consensus.
      - 001sky 11y ago
        My point is if your can organize a paper with sixteen co-authors you can also arrange for peer review. Shortcutting the process makes no sense. Well, it makes perfect sense as propoganda. But not as sincere science.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
waterlesscloud 11y ago
If this is true, it's time to seriously consider geoengineering efforts to halt and reverse the trend. It's highly irresponsible to automatically take such things off the table when a 10 foot sea-level rise is predicted in 50 years. We need to do everything we can to stop this.
- xrange 11y ago
  If only humanity had discovered an energy source which was safer and cleaner than everything that came before, and produced no GHGs. Oh, and that we hadn't spent the last 60 years irrationally demonizing it.
  - elinchrome 11y ago
    The response to wind power never ceases to amaze me either.
    - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
      The problem with wind power is that in many places it makes no sense. It changes too quickly - faster than most other electricity production sources can cope. If you have hydro or something that can ramp up and down production as quickly as wind does - and the grid stability to be able to do so - wind could be great. But if you don't, it's not so great. And unfortunately far too often wind gets put in places that don't have that ability for political reasons. Grid-scale energy storage would be great - if we actually had it in any meaningful amount.
      - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
        There's very boring technologies to mitigate these problems and buy us enough time to figure out something better. Bigger grids, lots more wind turbines geographically distributed, pumped hydro, demand management, smart grids. These are all being rolled out right now in various places and we've not exploited these to anywhere near their full potential so we'd be best to do so before calling a halt to expanding wind (or solar, which has similar issues and solutions). In the short term gas burning plants that we only turn on when we actually need to is a stop gap measure that isn't perfect, but is better than just running them (or worse coal) all the time.
calinet6 11y ago
Given the general rate of change and the impact even half this effect could have on climate, with a huge amount of hand waving, I'm inclined to fully support this assumption just so we have a slim chance of getting it 12% handled before it starts to progress even slightly toward disaster. And then, if it turns out to be greatly overstated, maybe we'll have tackled it prudently anyway.
- jboggan 11y ago
  Yet any action towards this end consumes an unfortunately finite amount of physical resources, money, and human concern. There are opportunity costs to be weighed for every course, and what if it is cheaper to build dikes and levees than enact the kind of sweeping social and economic change necessary to even dent such a prediction? Perhaps that time and money is better spent providing clean drinking water, combating prolific diseases, or eradicating slavery? These questions of balance are quickly forgotten with such breathless Cassandras begging for attention and scaring the people who are too quick to delegate reasoning.
  - mikegioia 11y ago
    What is your point? That it could somehow be more economically worthwhile to build a levy than deal with the underlying cause to the ocean rising? If that's correct than you honestly have 0 business weighing in on this decision in any way. At what point in your world does it become "economically viable" to save civilization?
    - Asbostos 11y ago
      There's a cost to preventing it and a cost to protecting ourselves from it. One of them must be cheaper. We already make seawalls to protect against tsunamis rather than somehow trying to weld all the fault lines back together. That's because it's cheaper and serves the same goal.
      - mikegioia 11y ago
        That's only if the goal is to stop the water from breaching the land, though. That should not be the goal, and if it is, at what point does the goal finally become preventing the water from rising in the first place?
themartorana 11y ago
"Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist..." Al Gore? "In what may prove to be a turning point for political action on climate change, a breathtaking new study casts extreme doubt about the near-term stability of global sea levels." Unfortunately, for any action to take place, we'll have to lose NYC and Miami. Even then it'll be attributed to an angry, homophobic God instead of human-caused climate change by those who can afford to be air-lifted to their new chateau high above sea level. (We're still patriotically rebuilding New Orleans, FFS.) I don't have much faith left that any level of terrifying science can have any effect on our plutocracy. That said, this does feel extremely alarmist, even to me. Seeing all costal cities catastrophically wiped out (and permanently under water) in my lifetime is hard to fathom, no matter how much I appreciate the science.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Seeing all costal cities catastrophically wiped out (and permanently under water) in my lifetime is hard to fathom, no matter how much I appreciate the science. Presumably this unfathomability is why people still invest millions of dollars in affected real estate every day.
  - themartorana 11y ago
    It's interesting, no doubt. I should read everything with healthy skepticism, but really my initial gut reaction of "yeah right" was a little eye opening - if even I had a negative reaction to the assertions, I can't imagine what people who are skeptics of human-created climate change at all must think.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    As if capital and real-estate markets were capable of taking a sufficiently long-term view to worry about 50 years in the future!
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Their focus on the short term hasn't hurt them yet. Perhaps this phenomenon would spur financial "innovation". More probably, bailouts.
vaadu 11y ago
Science isn't about popularity or fame. Either the data supports his conclusions or it doesn't.
- obstinate 11y ago
  It seems like it's based on computer models, so it really depends on how well the models predict reality. Just fitting past data will not be sufficient.
  - polotics 11y ago
    any serious modelling will involve predictive runs with a starting point in the past, then matching the output to available actual time series data up to present time. I would be very surprised if this scientists' models were not subjected to this kind of routine testing.
    - aoeuasdf1 11y ago
      That's not sufficient. If you write 10 different models, each with 10s of thousands of parameters until you get the results you want, it doesn't matter how accurately the model seems to predict in the past. Modelling is a tricky business that easily falls prey to such "data snooping" methods.
- powera 11y ago
  From a pure science reporting point of view the news article screams "the claims in this news article are an outlier result that isn't actually likely to be true". The lack of peer review, the claims that things are actually 10 times worse than the consensus, the focus on the fact that it's a famous scientist all tend to correlate with really bad articles, and the article barely even mentions any of the actual science done here. (and the part it does mention the science claims that the article doesn't even say it will happen in the next century)
- mikeash 11y ago
  Climate change has become a political issue and politics is all about popularity and fame.
pbreit 11y ago
Whether it's man-made or not, I'm not sure there's much we can do at this point beyond adapting. Even if a country or continent went to zero emissions it wouldn't matter because of the rest of the world.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  We can not make it terribly worse.
- shoo 11y ago
  Logically, there is a great deal that could still be done to mitigate global warming. It is more a question of if enough people are knowledgeable of the issues and are actually willing to change their behaviour and apply pressure on the rest of society to force change. I think there is a huge difference between a +3.0C world in 2100, with stable cumulative emissions, and a +4.5C world in 2100, where the cumulative emissions are still rising. The former is probably very unpleasant (i.e. many people dead, particularly those unfortunate enough to be born poor or in the wrong country), the latter denotes some kind of worsening failure state for human civilisation. It is unfortunate that climate change is a long-term, uncertain consequence, a collective side-effect of economic activity, overpopulation, etc. If enough of the painful consequences of our actions could be experienced in the short term, across society, we'd probably have a very different attitude and a sharp motivation to change. > One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. -- Jared Diamond
- MattHeard 11y ago
  Your assumption is that if the US reduced their emissions as quickly as possible, it would likely not affect the emissions policies of other countries, but a lot of countries are refusing to cut emissions faster _because the US isn't doing so yet_. The process of a unilateral, bilateral, or trilateral dramatic reduction would likely work as such: 1. The United States, China, or Europe, or two or all three would internally implement programs to drastically reduce emissions. 2. In order to maintain economic competitiveness, border adjustments (tariffs and subsidies) would be applied to imports and exports to and from countries without similar carbon emission reduction programs. If these tariffs and subsidies are sufficiently carefully applied, they would be legal under international trade agreements.[1] 3. Countries without similar carbon emission reduction programs would suffer economically by losing access to large export markets due to the border adjustments. 4. The countries would have their economic incentives shifted so that it becomes much more economically viable for them to apply similarly dramatic reductions themselves and regain access to the large markets. 5. As more countries apply similarly dramatic reductions, the total volume of border adjustments would decrease, reducing market distortions and increasing international trade efficiency, while maintaining each country's programs for dramatically decreasing carbon emissions. Not just any country could do this, but the US could certainly start this process by itself. If the US started unilaterally, Europe would likely adopt similar measures and regain access to unadjusted imports and exports, which would create a very large bloc of high-consumption countries into which all countries (such as China and Australia) would want to regain cheap access. [1] http://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/going-global/ http://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/going-global/ (Would the WTO approve of carbon tax-related border adjustments? If the primary consequence was to discriminate because of carbon emissions rather than because of being a foreign country, then yes. Possibly...)
tdfx 11y ago
So who is on the hook for all the real estate that's going to disappear? Insurance companies?
- Asbostos 11y ago
  That's the job of property speculators. Curiously, the prices they pay seems to indicate that they don't expect it to happen and are putting their money where their mouth is - unlike scientists and reporters who have nothing to lose by being wrong.
  - Daishiman 11y ago
    There has been a substantial increase in flood insurance costs across the world as reinsurers have adjusted the probabilities of catastrophic flood and storm events. The problem is so big that insurers outright refuse to even contemplate most properties in at-risk zones.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
contingencies 11y ago
10 feet visualisation @ http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/ http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/ (select 3m and 0m, and compare differences). Sounds like the Dutch are ahead of the game. How does one bet economically on long term seawall futures? :) PS. Related blender art @ http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375956 http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375956 + http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375246 http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375246 + http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?374471 http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?374471

67 points by nkurz 11y ago

It's a pretty jarring revelation. Just two weeks ago, we were skating on the Thames: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11733369/Earth-heading-for-mini-ice-age-within-15-years.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11733369/Earth-headi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869499

hartror 11y ago
That was junk reporting. > not predicting a 60 percent drop in the light and heat emitted by the Sun, but a drop in magnetic activity in the Sun. This has only a marginal effect on the Sun’s light/heat output. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/07/14/global_cooling_no_were_not_headed_for_a_mini_ice_age.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/07/14/global_c...
- mturmon 11y ago
  Phil Plait, who does the Bad Astronomy blog, did a well-calibrated and respectful job with that piece. Phil is well hooked in to the solar community, so he is a good person to be consulting. Thanks for linking to it. Basically, the uproar was caused by a very speculative theory [1] that solar magnetic activity might be decreasing in the coming decades. This concept is not well-established; in fact, it is better-described as a highly speculative theory coming from a data extrapolation by a very small group of solar researchers, at one institution, over the last year or so. But even if their solar claims turn out to be true -- very big if given their methodology -- they (A) can't (and don't) link their magnetic claims to irradiance, and (B) the irradiance effect of sunspot/magnetic change is strongly believed to be quite small relative to other effects anyway, especially anthropogenic ones. [1] It was published in ApJ, but here is a relatively open link: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266799418_PREDICTION_OF_SOLAR_ACTIVITY_FROM_SOLAR_BACKGROUND_MAGNETIC_FIELD_VARIATIONS_IN_CYCLES_21-23 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266799418_PREDICTION...
jakub_h 11y ago
That "mini-ice-age" claim has been very quickly questioned by many. But the Gulf Stream reportedly exhibits strong signs of slowing down, which to me sounds like a much more important factor for the UK.
calinet6 11y ago
The complexity of climate patterns doesn't preclude both happening at once.
rosser 11y ago
And if their predicted worst-case scenario plays out, you'll probably be skating on the Thames again. It will just be a bit wider. Weather != climate.
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
^^^ sarcasm ^^^

stvswn 11y ago

Not trying to be a skeptic for its own sake, but its worth noting that, buried deep in the article, you can find reference to an "unorthodox publishing practice" -- it hasn't yet been peer reviewed.

in_cahoots 11y ago
Apparently their results are too urgent to be peer-reviewed. The cynic in me wonders why they couldn't put it up on the ArXiv while waiting for the peer review process to run its course. As a layperson I don't know what I'm supposed to make of these results. It looks like a bunch of prestigious authors held a press conference to convince non-specialist reporters that the end of civilization is a distinct possibility. But I know from my own research that you can convince the general public of anything as long as you can give a good presentation. Famous names and bold statements don't necessarily equal good science.
- 001sky 11y ago
  "Too urgent to be peer-reviewed" Maybe the sixteen co-authors could have...oh, wait what?
  - in_cahoots 11y ago
    I'm not sure if you are agreeing with me or being sarcastic, but the number of coauthors is not indicative of a broader consensus. I've published many papers with 20 or 30 coauthors - a handful of famous professors from one or two schools / modes of thought, and a bunch of postdocs, researchers, and grad students. We still had to go through peer review. The thing you have to remember is that this is all speculation. If they're right, 16 authors can say they were the founders of a new model. If they're wrong... Well there's always another model to publish. The fact that a bunch of friends and colleagues can agree on something doesn't mean there is a wider consensus.
    - 001sky 11y ago
      My point is if your can organize a paper with sixteen co-authors you can also arrange for peer review. Shortcutting the process makes no sense. Well, it makes perfect sense as propoganda. But not as sincere science.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

waterlesscloud 11y ago

If this is true, it's time to seriously consider geoengineering efforts to halt and reverse the trend. It's highly irresponsible to automatically take such things off the table when a 10 foot sea-level rise is predicted in 50 years. We need to do everything we can to stop this.

xrange 11y ago
If only humanity had discovered an energy source which was safer and cleaner than everything that came before, and produced no GHGs. Oh, and that we hadn't spent the last 60 years irrationally demonizing it.
- elinchrome 11y ago
  The response to wind power never ceases to amaze me either.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    The problem with wind power is that in many places it makes no sense. It changes too quickly - faster than most other electricity production sources can cope. If you have hydro or something that can ramp up and down production as quickly as wind does - and the grid stability to be able to do so - wind could be great. But if you don't, it's not so great. And unfortunately far too often wind gets put in places that don't have that ability for political reasons. Grid-scale energy storage would be great - if we actually had it in any meaningful amount.
    - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      There's very boring technologies to mitigate these problems and buy us enough time to figure out something better. Bigger grids, lots more wind turbines geographically distributed, pumped hydro, demand management, smart grids. These are all being rolled out right now in various places and we've not exploited these to anywhere near their full potential so we'd be best to do so before calling a halt to expanding wind (or solar, which has similar issues and solutions). In the short term gas burning plants that we only turn on when we actually need to is a stop gap measure that isn't perfect, but is better than just running them (or worse coal) all the time.

calinet6 11y ago

Given the general rate of change and the impact even half this effect could have on climate, with a huge amount of hand waving, I'm inclined to fully support this assumption just so we have a slim chance of getting it 12% handled before it starts to progress even slightly toward disaster. And then, if it turns out to be greatly overstated, maybe we'll have tackled it prudently anyway.

jboggan 11y ago
Yet any action towards this end consumes an unfortunately finite amount of physical resources, money, and human concern. There are opportunity costs to be weighed for every course, and what if it is cheaper to build dikes and levees than enact the kind of sweeping social and economic change necessary to even dent such a prediction? Perhaps that time and money is better spent providing clean drinking water, combating prolific diseases, or eradicating slavery? These questions of balance are quickly forgotten with such breathless Cassandras begging for attention and scaring the people who are too quick to delegate reasoning.
- mikegioia 11y ago
  What is your point? That it could somehow be more economically worthwhile to build a levy than deal with the underlying cause to the ocean rising? If that's correct than you honestly have 0 business weighing in on this decision in any way. At what point in your world does it become "economically viable" to save civilization?
  - Asbostos 11y ago
    There's a cost to preventing it and a cost to protecting ourselves from it. One of them must be cheaper. We already make seawalls to protect against tsunamis rather than somehow trying to weld all the fault lines back together. That's because it's cheaper and serves the same goal.
    - mikegioia 11y ago
      That's only if the goal is to stop the water from breaching the land, though. That should not be the goal, and if it is, at what point does the goal finally become preventing the water from rising in the first place?

themartorana 11y ago

"Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist..." Al Gore? "In what may prove to be a turning point for political action on climate change, a breathtaking new study casts extreme doubt about the near-term stability of global sea levels." Unfortunately, for any action to take place, we'll have to lose NYC and Miami. Even then it'll be attributed to an angry, homophobic God instead of human-caused climate change by those who can afford to be air-lifted to their new chateau high above sea level. (We're still patriotically rebuilding New Orleans, FFS.) I don't have much faith left that any level of terrifying science can have any effect on our plutocracy. That said, this does feel extremely alarmist, even to me. Seeing all costal cities catastrophically wiped out (and permanently under water) in my lifetime is hard to fathom, no matter how much I appreciate the science.

jessaustin 11y ago
Seeing all costal cities catastrophically wiped out (and permanently under water) in my lifetime is hard to fathom, no matter how much I appreciate the science. Presumably this unfathomability is why people still invest millions of dollars in affected real estate every day.
- themartorana 11y ago
  It's interesting, no doubt. I should read everything with healthy skepticism, but really my initial gut reaction of "yeah right" was a little eye opening - if even I had a negative reaction to the assertions, I can't imagine what people who are skeptics of human-created climate change at all must think.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  As if capital and real-estate markets were capable of taking a sufficiently long-term view to worry about 50 years in the future!
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Their focus on the short term hasn't hurt them yet. Perhaps this phenomenon would spur financial "innovation". More probably, bailouts.

vaadu 11y ago

Science isn't about popularity or fame. Either the data supports his conclusions or it doesn't.

obstinate 11y ago
It seems like it's based on computer models, so it really depends on how well the models predict reality. Just fitting past data will not be sufficient.
- polotics 11y ago
  any serious modelling will involve predictive runs with a starting point in the past, then matching the output to available actual time series data up to present time. I would be very surprised if this scientists' models were not subjected to this kind of routine testing.
  - aoeuasdf1 11y ago
    That's not sufficient. If you write 10 different models, each with 10s of thousands of parameters until you get the results you want, it doesn't matter how accurately the model seems to predict in the past. Modelling is a tricky business that easily falls prey to such "data snooping" methods.
powera 11y ago
From a pure science reporting point of view the news article screams "the claims in this news article are an outlier result that isn't actually likely to be true". The lack of peer review, the claims that things are actually 10 times worse than the consensus, the focus on the fact that it's a famous scientist all tend to correlate with really bad articles, and the article barely even mentions any of the actual science done here. (and the part it does mention the science claims that the article doesn't even say it will happen in the next century)
mikeash 11y ago
Climate change has become a political issue and politics is all about popularity and fame.

pbreit 11y ago

Whether it's man-made or not, I'm not sure there's much we can do at this point beyond adapting. Even if a country or continent went to zero emissions it wouldn't matter because of the rest of the world.

dredmorbius 11y ago
We can not make it terribly worse.
shoo 11y ago
Logically, there is a great deal that could still be done to mitigate global warming. It is more a question of if enough people are knowledgeable of the issues and are actually willing to change their behaviour and apply pressure on the rest of society to force change. I think there is a huge difference between a +3.0C world in 2100, with stable cumulative emissions, and a +4.5C world in 2100, where the cumulative emissions are still rising. The former is probably very unpleasant (i.e. many people dead, particularly those unfortunate enough to be born poor or in the wrong country), the latter denotes some kind of worsening failure state for human civilisation. It is unfortunate that climate change is a long-term, uncertain consequence, a collective side-effect of economic activity, overpopulation, etc. If enough of the painful consequences of our actions could be experienced in the short term, across society, we'd probably have a very different attitude and a sharp motivation to change. > One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. -- Jared Diamond
MattHeard 11y ago
Your assumption is that if the US reduced their emissions as quickly as possible, it would likely not affect the emissions policies of other countries, but a lot of countries are refusing to cut emissions faster _because the US isn't doing so yet_. The process of a unilateral, bilateral, or trilateral dramatic reduction would likely work as such: 1. The United States, China, or Europe, or two or all three would internally implement programs to drastically reduce emissions. 2. In order to maintain economic competitiveness, border adjustments (tariffs and subsidies) would be applied to imports and exports to and from countries without similar carbon emission reduction programs. If these tariffs and subsidies are sufficiently carefully applied, they would be legal under international trade agreements.[1] 3. Countries without similar carbon emission reduction programs would suffer economically by losing access to large export markets due to the border adjustments. 4. The countries would have their economic incentives shifted so that it becomes much more economically viable for them to apply similarly dramatic reductions themselves and regain access to the large markets. 5. As more countries apply similarly dramatic reductions, the total volume of border adjustments would decrease, reducing market distortions and increasing international trade efficiency, while maintaining each country's programs for dramatically decreasing carbon emissions. Not just any country could do this, but the US could certainly start this process by itself. If the US started unilaterally, Europe would likely adopt similar measures and regain access to unadjusted imports and exports, which would create a very large bloc of high-consumption countries into which all countries (such as China and Australia) would want to regain cheap access. [1] http://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/going-global/ http://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/going-global/ (Would the WTO approve of carbon tax-related border adjustments? If the primary consequence was to discriminate because of carbon emissions rather than because of being a foreign country, then yes. Possibly...)

tdfx 11y ago

So who is on the hook for all the real estate that's going to disappear? Insurance companies?

Asbostos 11y ago
That's the job of property speculators. Curiously, the prices they pay seems to indicate that they don't expect it to happen and are putting their money where their mouth is - unlike scientists and reporters who have nothing to lose by being wrong.
- Daishiman 11y ago
  There has been a substantial increase in flood insurance costs across the world as reinsurers have adjusted the probabilities of catastrophic flood and storm events. The problem is so big that insurers outright refuse to even contemplate most properties in at-risk zones.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

contingencies 11y ago

10 feet visualisation @ http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/ http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/ (select 3m and 0m, and compare differences). Sounds like the Dutch are ahead of the game. How does one bet economically on long term seawall futures? :) PS. Related blender art @ http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375956 http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375956 + http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375246 http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?375246 + http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?374471 http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?374471