On Climate Change Problems and Solutions

[jordan179]

I have noticed a lot of pointless emotional anger over the issue of climate change, in both directions.  People who are certain that we are in a period of anthropogenic global warming have to a large extent given up arguing the case rationally and merely attack anyone who disagrees with every element of the above statement as "climate change

Comments

[avon_deer]

Wow...I totally, utterly and unequivocally....agree with you.

[benschachar_77]

Maybe I'll have more to present later but I feel this needs to be said.

150 or so years is less than a drop in the bucket as far as the lifespan of our world is concerned and CO2 is actually one of the weakest greenhouse gases.

Just pointing that out.

[madwriter]

"150 or so years is less than a drop in the bucket as far as the lifespan of our world is concerned..."

I think you're right in respect to the world being affected short term vs. long term. But life for we humans could be awfully miserable for what appears to be a long while for us.

[luagha]

I have to disagree. I have two lengthy posts on my LJ, if you want to go back and read them, that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the true answer to the question of global warning!!1!!

They are:
http://luagha.livejournal.com/55631.html
http://luagha.livejournal.com/55892.html

For the TL;DR amongst you, here is the answer: We can't know.

Thermometers were not mass-produced until 1905. All data before 1906 is too vague to determine more than the broadest of trends because it doesn't come from thermometers but 'secondary data' with way too much error margin. All data from 1905 till 1985 is also too sparse and riddled with error, it ends up with an error margin that is larger than the changes being measured.

It's only until 1985 and area-of-effect thermography from satellites that we have anything resembling data. And it is swamped by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

[jordan179]

Secondary data, by which I assume you mean things such as glacial extents, isotope ratios, tree rings and so forth, are not as good as direct temperature measurements with thermometers, let alone infra-red camera equipped satellites, but they are better than noting. We've charted the climatic history of the entire Holocene with some precision using such techniques. When I say that we're in a natural cooling phase which is to some extent being opposed by anthropogenic warming, I'm not just making things up: I've seen detailed graphs of climate change over the last ten to twenty millennia.

Yeah, I'd rather we had satellite data from the Late Pleistocene on, but that's not going to happen barring the invention of time machines!

[ford_prefect42]

Leaving aside any agreements or disagreements regarding what is going on with the climate, your "solution" remains correct.

The only way out is through.

If we try to "go back to nature", we guarantee near extinction level death tolls, because the "natural" carrying capacity of the planet is on the order of a few hundred million. Killing off 90% of humanity is a nonstarter of a plan.

[celandine13]

Largely I'm with you (just with bigger error bars on which technologies to use.) We need to flood-proof, drought-proof, and bug-proof things much more than is typical.

Right now the US government is not very good at -- well, anything, but certainly not infrastructure and disaster response. So the path from here to robustness is a schlep. It involves working with private industry *and* governmental agencies, and somehow getting a small committed group of people to do this without becoming corrupt, possibly because they're getting filthy rich by honest means.

Maybe Elon Musk is aiming for this? Maybe someone in his 'school' (i.e. an engineering entrepreneur with remarkable ability to pull off feats of effectiveness) will do it? I'd be inclined to think that this is a small-group kind of thing rather than a decentralized kind of thing but I'm not super-confident.