Skeptical Scientists Urge World To 'Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference - with evidence

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=c9554887-802a-23ad-4303-68f67ebd151c

by gibsonf1 • 19 years ago

21 24 19 years ago

epw.senate.gov

sethjohn5• 19 years ago

"We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming."

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC"

"carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else"

This is the sort of nonsense that makes me ashamed to call myself a 'climate skeptic'. Then of course, I watch Al Gore's film where he shows Florida sinking under the ocean and that is ridiculous as well. Climate change is a potential-problem about which there are great (truly gigantic!) uncertainties and therefore no easy answers.

brlewis• 19 years ago

In Gore's film he talks about Antarctic ice melting much faster than scientists projected. That's part of the gigantic uncertainty you're concerned about. When there's gigantic uncertainty, a valid question is, "What is the worst-case scenario here?" Gore presented the Florida scenario as something that could happen if all the ice melted.

sethjohn5• 19 years ago

"What's the worst case scenario" may be a valid question, but it's not a very helpful question...particularly not in a mass-market film where the caveat 'this is extremely unlikely' will be forgotten and the take-home message is that Florida is about to disappear.

People should be informed about the issues in a manner that is as honest and realistic as possible, particularly when the uncertainties are so great.

pixcavator2• 19 years ago

> Antarctic ice melting much faster than scientists projected.

This only proves that those models were crap.

joeguilmette2• 19 years ago

i dont think anyone can deny that are a great many 'gigantic' uncertainties related to the science behind climate change.

some simple logic, however, is more than enough to convince me that doing something is the vastly superior alternative to doing nothing.

if we choose to spend vast resources curbing emissions and such and we are wrong, those resources go to waste. given the current deployment of resources by our western civilization, such waste would need to go a long way to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.

if we listen to the most passionate of skeptics and choose to do nothing and we are wrong, by worst case estimates we're going to lose in a very big, spectacular fashion. we wont be counting beans to see how much money was squandered 'going green', we'll be trying to find a patch of green to grow some food.

davidw2• 19 years ago

I don't think it's "simple" at all, because you have to look down into the details: doing what costs what, what are the worst case projections, how much it costs (theoretically) to avoid them, what are the best case projections... all that kind of stuff, as well as look skeptically at margins of errors on various projections. Not as exciting as yelling "doom! gloom!" or saying "problem, what problem?", but ultimately more productive, in my opinion. From what I've seen, some sort of middle course is likely the best approach for the time being. Start doing something, but maybe not going all out, just yet.

On an interesting, and related note, an economist points out that property prices aren't falling (or at least relatively more where all prices are falling) in coastal areas that would be hit by rising sea levels.

sethjohn5• 19 years ago

Some of the most interesting writing on this subject was the Copenhagen Consensus (www.copenhagenconsensus.com), and the critical responses to the Copenhagen Consensus.

The CC was a group of economists who got together and tried to figure out which world-problems were most economical to solve. I.e., if you had a fixed amount of money where would you spend it to do the most good. The list was something like: 1. AIDS prevention in Africa. 2. AIDS treatment in Africa. 3. Generalized healthcare in the 3rd world. etc etc. Last. Climate change

There are a lot of problems with the approach they took (considering only at the monetary value of lives not the "spiritual" value, assuming that charitable giving is a finite resource), but their approach of trying to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis yields some very interesting results.

If I really thought the cost was equivalent to "counting beans" and the benefit was avoiding a situation where we could no longer find arable land, I would agree that we should act quickly and strongly to halt CO2 emissions. In fact, I suspect that allowing the third-world access to cheap (fossil fuel) energy will benefit them more than avoiding small changes in climate.

Of course, when it comes to American's perceived god-given right to drive around in monsterous SUVs...I come down firmly on the side of the environmentalists!

Elfan• 19 years ago

The Copenhagen Consensus looked only at a 5 year window. Since most of the likely costs of climate change take place farther in the future it is unsurprising that they found so little benefit for mitigation.

While economic analysis is very important in this case it is also very difficult. You can get any result you want be fiddling with the discount rate.

marcus• 19 years ago

The reason fighting climate change scored so low in the CC was not that the problem is not real, its that the damages are still pretty far down the road and that we don't have any really cost-effective ways to do it.

We need to keep spending on research in the area until we can find a solution that will make financial sense.

PS: look up the TED talk on the Copenhagen Consensus for a quick review of the issue

joeguilmette2• 19 years ago

If you take a look at how access to cheap fossil fuels has molded the post-WWII American landscape, I don't think there is a very strong argument to support the claim that such access to inexpensive oil is going to benefit anyone, especially countries just beginning get into urban development.

In the context of newly developing countries (i.e. third world countries that won't be third world countries in a few decades) the development of greentech is of paramount importance. The technologies and research behind preventing climate change (as theoretical as it all is) is very, very related to smart growth and green technology. By researching and implementing such tech, helping the reversal of our earth's possible climate change will (hopefully) be a useful side-effect.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that by arguing that we should sit around and do nothing, we are setting ourselves up for disaster, and not just in the context of global warming. Sure, there is plenty of room to debate not only our contribution to the earth's warming, but even if we are warming at all.

There is not room to debate, however, whether or not we should pursue green fuels, smart growth, and to begin visualizing how our society is going to react to the end of the era of cheap oil.

These are some great Ted talks on the subject. The tragedy of suburbia. Hilarious, profane, and spot on. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/121

John Doerr talks about the importance and profitability of green tech, the $6 trillion 'mother of all markets'. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/128

vitaminj• 19 years ago

This hypothetical "fixed amount" of money idea is a bit disingenuous in my opinion, especially since the methods for funding the proposed solutions are very different. The way governments are tackling climate change is primarily through regulation (ie, limiting carbon emissions) - the costs of which will eventually be passed on to the consumer by industry.

The fixed amount of money concept assumes that solving the other problems (eg. AIDS, 3rd world health, etc) are realistic opportunity costs for tackling climate change... but I don't think people would (in aggregate) willingly spend the money saved from climate change regulation on solving these other problems. They'd probably just buy more stuff for themselves.

The equivalent scenario would be if governments taxed people the same amount as the cost of regulation - and that is a tad unrealistic.

ggrot• 19 years ago

There is alot of good data on the Copenhagen Consensus and climate change on wikipedia of all places: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus

The conference was run by Bjorn Lomborg who is an avid climate change skeptic and hence there may be some bias. Read Scientific American's critique of his work and you can judge for yourself: http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/reading/sciam.pdf

It was also only attended by economists, and the effects of the discount rate and formula they applied (only considering a the next 300 years) might were said by one of the attendees that "climate change was set up to fail".

Dauntless• 19 years ago

I bet it feels good to be paid to support pollution.

sethjohn5• 19 years ago

It's been interesting to notice over the course of this morning the modding activity on this subject. Seems like comments on both sides of the issue are being both up-modded and down-modded at a furious pace!

davidw2• 19 years ago

Yeah... I kind of wish topics like this would be left to reddit or elsewhere, as the debates end up looking a little bit too much 'belief based' for my liking. I guess I shouldn't participate if I think that...

Tichy• 19 years ago

An article with some random people with random credentials making claims without giving any reasons. Completely useless for forming an opinion, so I don't understand why this got modded up.

Skeptical Scientists Urge World To 'Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference - with evidence

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