Stephen Schneider Award - Dec. 4, 2012

For the record.

Several climate scientists have said they are very concerned that uncontrolled fossil-CO2 burning could put human civilization it a place where it would really not rather be. This has often been regarded as alarmism. Maybe it is, but maybe they are right.

Let us simply imagine that they are right, what could we do? Solar and wind could provide much more energy than now, but it requires further front-end ivestments. This is difficult in a constrained global economy. Tidal and nuclear could provide more, at even greater costs. Funding sources are not obvious.

Now, let us instead imagine that they are wrong. In that case, the obvious thing to do is contiune the current path dominated by fossil-CO2 burning. This simplicity can play very well, but it does not answer the question about whether CO2 of 600 (800? 1000?) ppm could in any way harm our shared enterprise.

Could it harm? Hundreds of publications have looked at that, and y'know all the proposed harm could be wrong. Yet they could be right. It seems odd to imagine that we here at PC are going to figure it out.

Instead, we are a small congenial group where everything known to us gets a look, and nobody calls anybody else an A-hole. There is no other purpose to discuss climate change at PC. Ideas discussed here will not affect the world's chosen path.

Get real.

 

Science is science, politics is choice.

 

A friend brought up in Facebook today, that soilent green took place in 2022. I guess in 1973 when it was made, food shortages and over population was the big bad. 2022 is coming up fast, and it doesn't look like we are going to have to eat people Americans do recycle a great deal more than in 1973.

I feel more threatened by Somali terrorists blowing up random people at a mall in kenya. I know the odds are low, but some of the members of that terror group come from Minnesota.

We all have seen the movie where an asteroid is going to blow up the earth. Hey one wiped out the dynasaurs why not us?

Further down the list is everyone dying from aCC in the near future. We know at some point everybody dies, and eventually if nothing else does climate change will kill us before we are burned by the sun going super nova.

That doesn't mean population growth, terrorism, asteroids aren't problems, but they can be handled. The smaller threat of climate change should be able to be handled too. For solutions though we should be looking at decades not fast fixes.

The easier stuff for the US would be a three card monty on reduction of oil and coal use, while substituting cleaner alternatives. My suggestion would be $40/bbl oil tax and a $50/ton on coal. I would only go up $10/year, instituting the oil tax in 4 years, the coal tax in 5. One of the big externalitities is health care, which means you can use the money to reduce medicare taxes pay for road/rail infrastructure while being fairly tax neutral. To make this a non regressive tax, I would start medicare taxes at $10,000, remove the cap (lets not pretend this is an insurance program), and lower the rates based on revenue coming in. In this way it would produce the most good (reduction in oil dependancy, coal pollution, and ghg) for the fewest bucks. It may even help the economy grow faster as people buy more efficient cars and less gasoline.

If we are looking at the small risks of climate disaster, it may be nuclear has even greater risks. Why would we publically subsidize it against natural gas/wind/solar? Both natural gas and wind are cheaper today when costs are considered than nuclear, and solar very democratic. Continuing the swap to these three from coal seems like the proper path. You need to really fudge some risk numbers to come up with government higher subsidies for nuclear being an economically efficient way to reduce risk of bad things happening in the future.

 

Negative.

Science is very much based in (blind) faith. Those "flat earthers" that you called idiots in another post were the scholars of their day. Same with the guys who said the universe revolved around the earth.

 

^Clearly you do not understand the basics of science. It is not based on "blind" faith, but rather based on hypothesis, testing, refuting and ultimately verifiable, reproducible results.

The true idiots are those who continue to "believe" in (non) facts long after the preponderance of evidence proves them to be wrong...like those who still believe in the flat earth, or who beleive that human caused climate change is not happening!

Icarus

 

As with any other religious zealot, this is what makes conversation impossible. And alienates those who you are trying to persuade. This language has no basis in science.

 

Perhaps if we could teleport you to a cave some ~ 4000 years ago you would be viewed as a scholar around the fire.

 

And it's this noise from AGW cultists that makes nobody want to pay attention.

 

If you define 'nobody' as denialist idiots, then sure. You are an intellectual giant, Alice.

 

You're what makes the peanuts cartoon funny, and true.