freediver wrote on Oct 28^th, 2008 at 11:49am:



You can find the reports here:

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/index.htm

The technical summary from WG1 can be found here:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-ts.pdf

"Very High confidence  - At least 9 out of 10 chance of being correct"

Soren, It would be worth your while at least leafing through the technical summary. When you read in one of the denialist sites broad accusations such as "Water vapour has not been considered", you can check this against the contents and see for yourself whether or not it's true.

You'll find in in various reports. Probably the easiest to find is in the Summary for policymakers, where it says:

In general, uncertainty ranges for results given in this Summary for Policymakers are 90% uncertainty intervals unless stated otherwise, that is, there is an estimated
5% likelihood that the value could be above the range given in square brackets and 5% likelihood that the value could be below that range. Best estimates are
given where available. Assessed uncertainty intervals are not always symmetric about the corresponding best estimate. Note that a number of uncertainty ranges in
the Working Group I TAR corresponded to 2 standard deviations (95%), often using expert judgement.

People are sceptical because of this sort of thing, written exactly 40 years ago, perdicting unavoidable calamity:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970's the world will undergo famines--hundreds
    of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon
    now.  At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although
    many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth
    by increasing food production.  But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they
    are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.  Population control is
    the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual
    families, but of society as a whole.

    Nothing could be more misleading to our children than our present affluent society.  They will
    inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics, and economics of the
    1960's are dead.  As the most powerful nation in the world today, and its largest consumer, the
    United States cannot stand isolated.  We are today involved in the events leading to famine;
    tomorrow we may be destroyed by its consequences.

    Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action
    worldwide.  We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and
    penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.  We must use our political power to push
    other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.  And
    while this is being done we must take action to reverse the deterioration of our environment before
    population pressure permanently ruins our planet.  The birth rate must be brought into balance with
    the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion.  We can no longer afford merely to treat
    the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.  Population
    control is the only answer.
          -Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)


Never happened, yet there was fervour.
The Europeans actually were stupid enough to listen and all of them are now in significant demographic decline, some catastrophically so: Ukraine, Belorus, Italy. Spain.  China's one child policy and its prejudice against girl children, has resulted in a serious imbalance in favour of young chinese men. As Steyn said somewhere, China will be the first gay superpower since Sparta.


I know that the parallels are inexact. The fervour and sense of mission, however, are repeated as if 40 years was beyond remembering.

Soren, I think what you're saying is "don't try to fix anything major, because if you don't understand it properly and you mess with it, you'll just screw things up"

In the case of climate change, it's a question of reducing fossil fuel derived greenhouse gas emissions, preferably to zero.

In terms of the climate, we're already doing something with goes totally against the natural state of affairs. What we need to do is to stop messing with it, because we're almost certainly going to screw things up in a major way if we don't. Believe it or not, spewing huge volumes of CO2 into the atmosphere is not the natural state of affairs.

However, part of what you say is true. There is one major unwanted effect that will occur when we start to cut back on fossil fuel, and that relates to aerosols.

Aerosols are actually slowing down the heating effect caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If we were to cut all fossil fuel burning now, the global temperature would rise temporarily as the aerosols start to disperse.

People shouldd not be badgered. It must be made worthwwhile for them to do their bit, ethicall, economically, generationally and so forth. Gloom and doom has never worked when sheer economic survival is placed on the other side of the balance. People can't feed their children with predictions.

That's a totally inappropriate generalisation. Gloom and doom only fail when it is false. If it is 'true', people should be badgered. Take asbestos for example. Was it wrong for activists to badger companies and put their profits at risk merely because they were killing people? Or CFC's - was it wrong to coerce the global economy into ceasing their use so that the Ozone hole stopped growing? If there is a major problem, it should be shoved in people's faces so that action can be taken. It's a bit like war. It's silly to keep ranting that the Russians are coming to get us when you have no evidence. But when the Russian really are coming to get us we should act. And we shouldn;t wait until we are 100% certain. Or even 90% certain.

There is an odd mix of religious zeal and Stalinist intolerance in much of the environmentalist advocacy.

But not in the science or the economics. This is a strawman argument. The environmental activists are not the drivers of this issue.

There has never been a prediction about the future on this sort of scale and longitude that has actually been fulfilled.

So what? Actually, CFCs come pretty close. Asbestos was a major issue too.

This is what my Ehrlich reference points to.

That was a strawman. Nothing more.

Garnaud and the like is a statist dead end.

Garnaut has a far better grasp of the economics than you do.

Soren wrote on Oct 28^th, 2008 at 8:14pm:


I agree with part of what you're saying, especially that the carrot approach is better than the stick. Basically the way ahead is crystal clear - we need to substitute polluting industry, energy generation etc with sustainable options.

As far as economic consequences are concerned, they are pretty grim. Apart from the Climate change scenario, we have superimposed on that, the fact that we're going to run out of fossil fuels in the not too distant future, or initially demand will outstrip supply.

It's abundantly clear that what we need to do on both accounts is to replace fossil fuels with sustainable alternatives. You don't need to be a brain surgeon or a climatologist to see that.  

I also understand what you're saying about the evangelistic side of environmentalism. Maybe that does something for those of a religious leaning, but it leaves me stone cold.  As I said before, I don't really care if the general public take it on faith that we need to act, as long as governments are heading in the right direction. It's probably an impossible dream to think that everybody will suddenly understand the science. The danger is that dumb people vote, and there are a lot of them out there. Maybe we have to put up with the crusaders.

Of course in the end, it's not the belief that's really important, it's the action.

Another problem is that we have a new breed of Scientists. A few of them found it was very lucrative to criticise the science of Ozone depletion, and succeeded in buying the likes of Dupont an extra two years of production before they had to shut down Freon and CFC production. (I wonder how many billions of dollars that equated to.) They did this by deliberately obfuscating - muddying the waters with opaque technical details.  About the same time, some of them went to work for the tobacco industry, in many cases the same individuals. Nowadays these unscrupulous individuals and their protégés have a new cause - that of slowing down action on renewable energy production. Ask yourself why they would do that.

freediver wrote on Oct 29^th, 2008 at 6:14pm:



If anything, the link between CFC's and ozone depletion was much more tenuous. With CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the physics was pretty well wrapped up by the turn of the 19th century. Arrhenius was right on the money.

It's scary to me how such basic things as this can be made to sound so much more complicated that they actually are.

It's like - "Don't throw that banana skin down there, somebody might slip on it."

- Ah! but recent research shows that there is a natural anti-slip chemical in the mitochondria of banana cells. How can you prove that it will be less slippery without the banana skin?

- apart from that, banana skins are beneficial to the environment - they provide mulch.

- we don't want all these bureacrats telling us what to do with our banana skins. What do they want to do - have us bankrupt? It's no skin off my banana if we have to move offshore to Indonesia.

- we're currently working on an anti-slip matting fabricated from banana skins. We have our best marine biologists working on it right now. What I'm doing right now is in the nature of a pilot study.

- maybe we could have an annual quota of 10,000 banana skins, and we could strive towards improvement by only dropping 9,999 next year.

Quote:


Of course no climate scientist ever seriously suggested that the changes were caused by anything else other than anthropogenic effects. That line is for the press because there is so much disinformation out there in the public domain that needs to be corrected.