It is ok to piss in the forest.
It is natural, the bear behind you does it too, the plants need the water, and you're even recycling some valuable nitrogen and salt compounds.
It is not ok for 8 million people to take a piss in Central Park.
This is why climate change is important.
The problem is not the working schlob in his SUV, the problem is that he is one of a hundred million.
We exhale carbon dioxide, and that is ok. What is not ok is that we dump several gigatons of carbon in CO2 into the atmosphere every year for many decades.
This is not a matter of marxist theory or liberal ideology, it is a matter of physics and quantitative analysis. There is too much carbon dioxide being released from fossil fuel storage too rapidly for too extended a period.
The cost of this is not well captured by market economics, because the cost is externalised.
It is displaced from the beneficiaries in space, time and in marginal cost.
It would not actuall matter, if someone in upper Manhattan took a piss in Central Park every day, and they might benefit from it - lower water bills for one thing. Central Park might even benefit.
That does not mean everyone in New York can do it.
So we regulate such activities.
As a culture we also regulate things that we can foresee will have large impacts: thus you are required to follow driving regulations (they are not voluntary, they are enforced with fines, deprivation of driving privileges and jail if needed); we regulated emissions of lead, because cumulatively they were forecast to do massive widespread damage to health; we regulated freon production because continued use was forecast to lead to widespread harm from increased UV flux.
And, we will have to regulate carbon dioxide emission - probably sometime in the next 10-30 years.
Oil is not a problem in the long run, it will self-limit before then. The problem is continued burning of large coal reserves. Sometime this century this will have to be decreased by at least an order of magnitude. Methane could become a problem, but isn't yet.
This is a not a religious edict that is cast in stone forever, future generations can change their mind, except if we burn all the coal now. Then they can not change anything.
Burning all known coal reserved leads to CO2 levels of 800-1000 ppm, almost quadrupling pre-industrial levels. This will probably lead to mean heating of about 5 K, maybe a bit more.
That is well beyond the regime where linear perturbation analysis of consequences are relevant.
That is getting to Eocene climates, with ice free arctic and warm oceans.
The equilibrium climate and ecolocy, about a million years from now, might be nice enough.
The transition, 100-1000 years from now might be rather brutal.
There is no arrogance in deciding what CO2 levels to set as acceptable now.
If we do nothing, then we have decided to set the CO2 levels at 800+ ppm for the next 100,000 years or more (barring magic technology in the next millennium and the population and industrial base to use it - ie it must not have been destroyed by the change).
We can access the fossil fuels, we have the technology to use them up, and we have the capability to refrain from doing so.
We ought to make an informed choice that is risk averse enough, not a blind choice.
No one is talking about shutting down civilization or leaving people to freeze in the dark.
We are talking about diverting 0.1% of economic effort into efficiency and technology development, and maybe 0.5% of the economy into economic incentives and regulation.
The second order effects may be positive, ie there might be net economic gain. Or all the gain might be in probabilistic averted costs - if this averts famines, major wars or populations dislocations then the cost is small compared to the benefit.
- Log in to post comments
"It would not actuall matter, if someone in upper Manhattan took a piss in Central Park every day, and they might benefit from it - lower water bills for one thing. Central Park might even benefit."
I imagine there's probably SOMEBODY who already does.
We're gonna spend a night at New York tonight with my father so I am afraid I will have to belong to those 8 million people who piss in Central Park. I hope that this fact will allow me to continue to think that "climate change" is not important, as you suggest. ;-)
You write that it is not OK to exhale gigatons of CO2 a year for several decades. This statement is easily falsified because this is exactly what we've been doing: we've been emitting gigatons a year for several decades and everything is completely OK, don't you see? Why are you writing statements that are so manifestly wrong?
Your other statements are also wrong. Burning known fossil fuels won't lead to 5K increase (but rather 0.4K increase), even the crazy 5K increase is not outside the validity of perturbation theory (note that the average temperature of the surface is 287K and the current 14 K is 6 degrees below friendly temperatures for jogging).
Stern is talking about 1% of the economy, not 0.1 or 0.5, and it is still about plans whose effect is known to be unmeasurable. If you really wanted a measurable effect right now without waiting for the right technologies that can do it cheaply, you're talking more about 3% of the economy, which means annihilating an annual GDP growth.
You write that "not doing anything" is like "deciding there will be 800 ppm for 100 000 years". That's complete nonsense.
First of all, if we stop burning, the concentration will return to the 180-280 ppm interval within a few thousand years - it will be absorbed by an increased life of plants etc.
Second of all, it is not "us" (whomever you mean by "we") who decided to make the concentration 800 ppm around 2150. It is the laws of physics that have decided. People want to live in an advanced world which means that they must burn fuels which implies that CO2 inevitably rises. You can't decide that some of these steps don't work because they're laws of physics. So you can't say that the result of these laws of physics is your (or my) decision.
The only thing you can decide is to prevent someone from living a prosperous life in an advanced society - but then you're committing a highly arrogant, totalitarian act at the level of Nazis. I won't allow you to dictate me how should I circulate my carbon, do you understand?
'The only thing you can decide is to prevent someone from living a prosperous life in an advanced society..."
because energy star appliances are inferior to non-energy star appliances. By using less energy for the same or greater effect they are in fact useless.
'This statement is easily falsified because this is exactly what we've been doing: we've been emitting gigatons a year for several decades and everything is completely OK, don't you see?'
define "OK". It seems the logic here is 1) The current climate changes are OK 2) we have been pumping out gigatons of CO2 3) as the climate it OK, then CO2 will not have an effect ever
"Second of all, it is not "us" (whomever you mean by "we") who decided to make the concentration 800 ppm around 2150. It is the laws of physics that have decided."
As a purely philosophical point the laws of physics don't 'decide' to
do anything
What is with the constant nazi comments?
a cornellian: According to Lubos' blog, "immoral politicians" and "radical Communists" have joined the Nazis by believing in global warming, thereby completing the trifecta. Thank goodness Lubos is occupying the sensible center.
Lubos appears never to have heard of the phrase "tragedy of the commons". As an experimentalist, I think it's not unreasonable to have a healthy sense of caution before taking a knob on your highly nonlinear, complicated, one-of-a-kind, absolutely critical apparatus, and dialing it waaaaay up beyond where you've ever had it.
Steinn,
I just wanted to mention that this post (and your prior two posts) are eloquent and right on the money.
There is, astonishingly, one thing that Lubos Motl may be partly correct about, which is that the long-term CO2 level probably won't stay at 800pm+ for 100,000 years. The relevant chapter of the most recent IPCC report (Working Group I Report, Chapter 10) surveys several recent simulations and suggests that -- if one assumes a particular scenario in which industrial CO2 emission is switched off in 2100 -- the CO2 concentration peaks at around 700 ppm, then decays to about 450 ppm by the year 3000 (Figure 10.35). (This is mostly due to absorption in the ocean, not plant growth.) This, by the way, corresponds to an equilibrium surface temperature of 1.4-3 K higher than today, which has a good chance of melting most of the Greenland ice sheet.
Lubos Motl said:
You write that it is not OK to exhale gigatons of CO2 a year for several decades. This statement is easily falsified because this is exactly what we've been doing: we've been emitting gigatons a year for several decades and everything is completely OK, don't you see? Why are you writing statements that are so manifestly wrong?
"Hey! I cranked the thermostat up to 80 degrees a whole two minutes ago, and the temperature in the house has only gone up to 71! It's not working!"
Thermal inertia? You have studied non-particle physics at some point in your life, yes?
In fact, the predicted current effect of the already-emitted CO2 is warming of ~ 0.7 C, which matches the observed 20th C warming extremely well. This is only the beginning, of course.
(This is akin to someone who's just downed an entire bottle of vodka proclaiming, "Wha'? Come on, man, I just drank an entire bottle not five minutes ago, and nothing's happened to me! Give me another couple of bottles for the road!")
Your other statements are also wrong. Burning known fossil fuels won't lead to 5K increase (but rather 0.4K increase), even the crazy 5K increase is not outside the validity of perturbation theory (note that the average temperature of the surface is 287K and the current 14 K is 6 degrees below friendly temperatures for jogging).
Where do your wacky numbers come from? The most recent IPCC summary puts the estimated increase by 2100 -- which does not include the entire fossil fuel inventory -- at 1.8-4 K. This is not the total increase, which will occur after the peak in atmospheric CO2 is reached. This of course assume that there no dangerous additional effects, like significant CO2 releases from warming tundra and bogs or methane releases from sea-floor clathrates.
Second of all, it is not "us" (whomever you mean by "we") who decided to make the concentration 800 ppm around 2150. It is the laws of physics that have decided.
"Your honor, it may be true that I continued smoking cigarettes in bed, despite being repeatedly warned not to, but I'm not responsible for the house catching on fire and burning down! The laws of physics did it, not me!"
Dear Cornellian,
it is a fantasy to think that most people are wasting energy just for the sake of it. Maybe Al Gore and a few others but most places simply don't do it. Energy is necessary, and replacements by less consuming devices are usually too expensive if they're not made. When you summarize these facts, it follows that civilization that consumes more energy is indeed more developed than society that consumes less.
I didn't say that CO2 can't ever have any effect etc. Of course that everything in the real world has some effect on everything else. But the question is whether the effect of CO2 today or in 20 years is something that should deserve attention. It is a quantitative question. The answer is No as seen by the fact that the increase of CO2 from 280 to 385 ppm didn't cause any problems.
Dear Peter, thanks for the details about the timescale when CO2 returns to the older values. I agree with you that the 0.6 C increase matches the bare greenhouse effect. And I also think that 0.6 C increase in 100 years is not something worth attention of policymakers.
I don't trust the IPCC numbers about temperature in next 100 years. It's all pseudoscience - a combination of very inaccurately known number in such a way that pre-conceived conclusions are confirmed by the results.
Best
Lubos
Dear Doug,
I view "tragedy of the commons" as a communist meme designed to increase the regulation of the society. It is an approach that is incapable to see things from all directions.
Just like there is tragedy of the commons when individual people consume more XY than the "ideal" collective recommendation would be, there is also a lot of tragedies of the anticommons where they spend less than they should ideally do.
People don't act optimally but they try to act as optimally as they can get, and a selective one-way correction by an authority is bound to be counterproductive.
Best
Lubos
"We exhale carbon dioxide, and that is ok. What is not ok is that we dump several gigatons of carbon in CO2 into the atmosphere every year for many decades.
This is not a matter of marxist theory or liberal ideology, it is a matter of physics and quantitative analysis. There is too much carbon dioxide being released from fossil fuel storage too rapidly for too extended a period."
This is misleading. The phrase "it is a matter of physics" is true about the line before but the next sentence is NOT physics or quantitative analysis and I wish people would stop equating the two - our policies would be much better if they did. "too much" for who and for what? the answer to that is not physics or quantitative analysis - it is politics and morality.
See it is not a scientific issue that we should reduce atmospheric CO2, it is a moral and political one. That fact certainly seems to be understood by the people trying to stop any limits on burning fossil fuels - thay are doing everything they can to keep messing with a scientific argument. People who think there should be limits or disincentives on using fossil fuels I think should be shifting to the moral ground all the time. The science is very complicated in detail but in terms of policy it is simple - we are making the atmosphere hotter and that extra energy is going to mess around with climates on timescales that will cause human suffering. Are we going to do anything about this or not?
Lubos - So, by your rationalization, all regulation is bad. We should just let market forces determine everything. It doesn't matter if some company makes food that actually contains rat poison; once consumers realize that, they'll switch brands. If an airline decides not to maintain its aircraft, that's fine, since market forces will eventually shut down the airline.
Not every form of regulation is intrinsically bad. Saying that there is such a thing as the common good does not make me a communist. Would we all be better off if there were no traffic laws?
According to libertarian philosophy, market forces determine pretty much everything (at least in society). Regulations are deviations of the "ideal", and it is to be opposed at all costs. Judging by his postings, I think that Lubos subscribes to this p.o.v.
"You write that it is not OK to exhale gigatons of CO2 a year for several decades. This statement is easily falsified because this is exactly what we've been doing: we've been emitting gigatons a year for several decades and everything is completely OK, don't you see? Why are you writing statements that are so manifestly wrong?"
This really sums it up.
Factually wrong, ignorant of the data and logically fallacious, all in one go.
Total carbon emissions in the industrial era are estimated at just over 300 Gtons,
half of which were emitted in the last 30-40 years. 1750 levels of emissions are probably safe in perpetuity, we could probably keep at 1950 levels for a long time, but 1995 emission levels are too high to continue safely for many more decades.
The trend can not be continued safely; everything is not completely OK, we are starting to see hints of problems; and the entire premise of Lubos' argument is a logically incorrect.
What is a matter of physics is the climate forcing if the accessible fossil carbon is all burned on a time scale short compared to carbon cycle time scales.
Ocean uptake may relax us back to < 500 ppm if we stop in 2100, depends on whether deep water circulation is affected; but if we go to 1000 ppm peak, we may stay well above 500 ppm for a long time.
There is no law of physics that says we must get our primary source of energy from combustion of fossil carbon. We will run low on oil "soon", so that particular source will be ramped down soon.
We know how to substitute coal combustion, the only question is whether we keep burning it as fast as we can until we have to switch, or whether we anticipate problems by actually trusting our hard found scientific method, and think about substituting coal earlier than the last possible moment.
Coal costs are not well captured by a free market model because coal burning has large diffuse externalities, and not just from CO2 emissions, but also from particulates and sulphur dioxide, and even from actinides.
The waste from coal burning is dumped on all of us, and when that happens on quantitatively large scale it does harm, and then it is regulated. The alternative is for people to die unnecessarily.
I am very curious what calculation gets the Delta Teff as low as 0.4K - that is already same as or smaller than the forcing to date, and we certainly have not yet burned all fossil fuels.
Oh, and 5K is a small fraction of 288K, but that is not sufficient to know whether linear perturbation analysis is adequate. Sheesh.
Further, mean effective temperature is only one of many climate statistics, it is often quoted because it is a useful proxy for the magnitude of the effect. But other climate statistics may have larger changes - like regional temperatures, and more importantly the precipitation.
Mean regional temperature changes in the arctic will be very large if we switch to a climate state where the arctic is ice free year-round, which is quite possible for high sustained levels of CO2 emissions.