Judith Curry’s post on climate change at Climate, Etc. echoes points I made although not with respect to climate change on distinguish between risks and issues. I disagree with this observation:
‘Risk’ is not overly alarmist, but it does imply that the harm is quantifiable and mitigable — which I have argued that it is not.
Perhaps it depends on what the meaning of “is” is. I think there is possible harm, neither the harm nor the timeframe are quantifiable at this point, but I do think the risk can be mitigated. I just think that the go-to strategy for mitigating it, a carbon tax, is unlikely to work as a means for lowering emissions. For it to work the level of emissions produced by those who are sensitive to the tax must be high enough to have the desired effect. Since I believe that carbon emissions increase exponentially with income, a tax that’s high enough to produce the necessary results would need to be so draconian as to be politically impossible.
Which is why I think that, if you genuinely want to mitigate the risk of carbon emissions, the solution you should prefer is a technological solution along the lines of the many strategies I’ve posted on here rather than carbon taxes or alternative fuels. You might accomplish other objectives by those strategies but not mitigating the risks posed by climate change.
The first step is just to acknowledge that the problem is real. As to a solution, I agree that is tough. I don’t think a carbon tax alone will do it either.
Steve
The Earth is alternating between warm and cold periods. The Earth’s axis wobbles, and the Ice Ages occur. Stop the wobble, and you stop the global warming. Good luck.
I will toss a bone to the true believers. The warming will continue to a certain maximum point. If CO2 is suddenly causing a problem, the most likely effect would be to speed up the warming, and at the natural maximum point, the extra heat would make the Earth hotter until it began cooling again.
(NOTE: There is no skipping an Ice Age, and the Earth is still warming from the last Ice Age.)
Again, the oceans are ginormous heat sinks that can store a massive amount of heat, and the various currents convey the heat from the poles to the equator, from east to west, and from the surface to the depths. The plate tectonics also are a factor because like the oceans, they function on geological timescales, and during those time frames, the continents will move. Meaning, the oceans will be affected.
I may have mentioned the Earth’s outer core and magnetic field, but as I am rather bored with the subject, I will leave that for another day or individual research..
Tasty touched on several factors. There are a good half dozen more, and sorting out cause and effect, magnitude and feedback loop interactions among the factors becomes impossible. As such, anyone who tells you he or she “knows” that humans’ greenhouse gas emissions cause “global warming” is a zealot. And they still don’t have a theory that produces reliable predictions. Without those you’ve got nothing. I hope people will pardon me if I observe that the universal solution of slowing growth and taxing carbon is a bit, shall we say, convenient. As I’ve said, when the AGWers start advocating nuclear I’ll take notice.