thoughts on global warming/”climate change”
I haven’t said much about “climate change”, because I’ve only peripherally followed the scientific developments, and I don’t know much of what there is to know about it.
That’s never stopped me before, so here are my thoughts.
- Scientists are probably right, mutatis mutandis, about global warming.
- There is some doubt about whether it is all caused by humankind, but there is little doubt that some of it is.
- Some of the damage can probably be corrected.
- The price of that correction will be massive restriction and infringement of liberty worldwide [in the relatively few places which have it].
Cf. some snarkage by Bill.
Jo on
05.30.2007 @ 10:41
Your first two points are basically right. I don’t know that anyone is trying to claim that that all of the change is attributable to humans. The IPCC statement and similar assessments by the NAS, AGU, AAAS, WMO, etc., all refer to “most” of the warming. When human forcings are left out of the model, but natural forcings are not, we predict more or less no change. When we include human forcings, we predict a substantial change.
I know what you mean by “corrected,” but I suspect that “prevented” would be a better choice. A chaotic system like the global climate is unlikely to return to the same equilibrium we have now once it’s been perturbed far enough. “correction” will verge on the impossible (over reasonable time scales), but “prevention” is very practical.
As for the “massive restriction and infringement of liberty worldwide,” I’d look to the civil liberties horror that resulted from the Montreal Protocol on CFCs. Surely you recall the CFC cops seizing your air conditioners?
No? Did you notice the billions of dollars it cost the economy, and the massive drain on the economy of the ’90s? Nope, because whatever economic impact it had was smaller than economic cycles driven by other forces.
Dealing with climate change will be more expensive than saving the ozone hole, no doubt. But “more than negligible” is not automatically “massive.” OTOH, the cost of unchecked climate change will be massive. Imagine the agricultural economy of a hotter, drier Kansas.