I don’t agree that “overpopulation” has been debunked as a valid concern, but it certainly isn’t the root cause or immediate solution for global warming. I don’t believe African CAN support twice its current population, but that would be a separate paper of some length to sort out. China is paying a price for thinking that overpopulation was not a concern, back in 1949, then finding out that they would have been a lot better off with only 600 million people or so. Now they have to get draconian to try to scale back a bit, or even stabilize. It is not directly related to their carbon output.

The real solution to global warming is not convincing everyone to turn off their TV and park their cars — nor forcing them to do so by police action. The real solution is to set up incentives that take into consideration the full cost of carbon emissions, then, coming up with new technology. It would help of course to inspire new forms of urban AND rural planning to cut down on the need for vehicles — communities where people could conveniently walk to work, to the store, to church, or ride bicycles convenient distances without being marathon enthusiasts… The approach John lays out seems to be a good one. But its not far different from cap and trade. Cap and trade worked fairly well to deal with acid rain from sulfur dioxide pollution. Its not a right to pollute. Pollution law starts with an absolute prohibition on ALL pollution, then sets some allowed limits since it is not feasible to cease at once.

Pay for our wars? What a novel idea. I thought that’s what children were for.

Oh, wait. We’re not having any of them, either.

So we are not putting a high enough price on the resources we use – water, air, oil, coal, etc. Just the extaction cost, not the replacement cost. That’s where reasonable taxes make sense. Charge a tax of $25/ton of Carbon emitted. Charge a $1/gallon of gasoline to pay for the wars that defend our American ability to extract oil and our lifestyle.

But given our current (American) political talents, where Conservatives oppose every tax on every thing and yet spend like drunken sailors when they can and their popular demonization of gummint since Ronald Reagan, it does not appear that we will avoid getting to “oops.”

Hmmm. What do you say after you say “ooops!”?

Exactly. But it cuts both ways. What if we spend 60% of our society’s productivity reducing our carbon footprint, and it turns out we didn’t have to? If you put 100 policemen on a city block, you’ll certainly reduce crime but you’ll never really know how many actual crimes you prevented. It’s an uncalculatedable cost-benefit ratio.

Then wouldn’t you want to err on the side of caution?

If we took that approach we’d have never smelted iron ore, gold ore, created and used artificial fertilizer, dammed rivers, and so on. Virtually _everything_ modern society does has a negative ecological impact. Who decides what we should be cautious about?

Ah, so those are the only choices. I see.

If one looks at the supposed CO2 reductions we “need” to “save the planet”, realistically then I’d say yes. I don’t see any takers…

Jon

My main beef with these carbon zealots is that they always seem to want other people to be forced to change their habits, while they are most reluctant to do so themselves. I am a firm believer is stewardship, and do what I can to lead a life with minimal waste of resources, but I cannot say the same for many of the environmentalists of my acquaintance.

Hmmm. What do you say after you say “ooops!”?

the policy decision will have to be done absent hard scientific “proof”.

Then wouldn’t you want to err on the side of caution?

how many of us first-worlders are willing to start living an African subsistence lifestyle?

Ah, so those are the only choices. I see.

If the temperature increased a couple of degrees uniformly around the world there would be changes but few catastrophes. What is going to happen is that the grain belts in N. America and Asia are going to move north, Russia is going to benefit immensely. Rainfall patterns are changing, leaving billions of people in permanent drought conditions and forcing mass migrations.

As for Antarctica, from Skeptical Science

“If the Southern Ocean is warming, why is Antarctic sea ice increasing? There are several contributing factors. One is the drop in ozone levels over Antarctica. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole has caused cooling in the stratosphere (Gillet 2003). This strengthens the cyclonic winds that circle the Antarctic continent (Thompson 2002). The wind pushes sea ice around, creating areas of open water known as polynyas. More polynyas leads to increased sea ice production (Turner 2009).

Another contributor is changes in ocean circulation. The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters. So now you have a surface layer that is less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted”

More snow doesn’t mean it’s colder;

When the CIA opens a new Dept to look at the national security impact from look at the national security impact from “phenomena such as desertification.;

Insurance companies are modifying their actuary tables (PDF);

And the American Association of Petroleum Geologists go from wildly cheering Michael Crichton to saying that the denialist position is “not supported by a significant number of our members and prospective members”

I would say the forecast calls for massive changes of the location of habitable areas with a possibility of being completely screwed.

My opinion is that we’re already past the tipping point and that oil production is going to drop just when we need access to cheap convenient transportable energy to prevent WW3. In asia alone three nuclear armed nations are going to lose their Himalayan water sources, Bangladesh will be most affected, so if they aren’t picking up and moving to higher ground because of rising sea levels they’ll be looking for water.

When climate change was just a hypothesis in the late 80′s in was predicted that the Artic might be ice free by 2100, every couple years that number has been adjusted downward. Quebec will be my retirement spot.

Even just talking about CO2, which is not really a pollutant but whose environmental concentration we currently believe is important, there’s no way that CO2 emitters could “prove” it will do no harm. We cannot run a planet-sized double-blind-with-placebo experiment over a time scale to prove this one way or the other. All we can do is wait and watch what happens with this planet. I’m not arguing that we cannot use good science to decide to control CO2 emissions or not, I’m just saying that the policy decision will have to be done absent hard scientific “proof”. (No, the simulations that much of climate science depends on are not proof, they are valid exploratory efforts, but I’m a computer scientist by trade and know too much about computer simulation to put too much faith in simulations.)

Finally, it’s easy to talk about “polluters” in the third person, and to take a harsh stand on controlling them, but let’s never forget that they are polluting on our behalf, not just because they want to pollute. It is we who are consuming the electricity (and thus coal), the gasoline, the plastics, the metal. It is our lifestyle that is causing the pollution. To put it another way that ties back to your article, how many of us first-worlders are willing to start living an African subsistence lifestyle?

Jon.

Of course the real tragedy is that no one wants to be told how much they can consume or how many children they can have, and guilt and shame are not really effective means of achieving sustainability. I agree that a deeper reverence for nature would, if widely-held, make the tragedy somewhat more bearable. I don’t sense this deeper reverence coming from the Christian right.

I think we have vastly underestimated the scientific education of most Americans, or at least that is conclusion that I draw from the fact that so many people have such settled opinions on a such a technical matter. Me, what do I know? No much. Only this: If you keep crapping in your nest, pretty soon your nest will smell like crap.

One sentence should be sufficient to prove the rhetorical sloppiness of that statement.

It should? Why? We know that temperatures have been higher than they are now, long before mass industry.
I really do not believe this is sufficient proof of anthropogenic global warming.
I recommend all interested parties view this filmed lecture by Christopher Monckton, entitled “Apocalypse?, No!” :
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5206383248165214524#