It is interesting that there are so many dissenting points of view of the climate conference. China shows sincerity at Durban Conference (2) - People's Daily Online Canadians react as Kent announces Kyoto withdrawal | The Vancouver Observer Climate change: It is a mistake to take this £64bn UN deal at face value | Mail Online I'm sure the Europeans will blame america, as they have done since kyoto.
I read the PDO link first and it stuck me as a bit blustery compared to other things I've read there before. But Doughty can bluster with the best of them. Anyway, I'd be satisfied of a bit of spare change went to REDD+ and a half dozen other initiatives that offer benefits outside the carbon cycle. But I haven't been able to get that out of the pdfs that hyosilver linked on the other thread. Others, I am sure, would be happier if such initiatives and research into the carbon cycle just went away. All that money, y'know. But what is the total global subsidies to the fossil fuel industry? Do I remember $200 billions/year accurately? That's the third rail we dare not touch.
One of the aspects that baffles me is how it's all about cutting back on greenhouse gasses and the complete lack of future energy sustainability. With the "climate panic" approach, the major desire for any country is to point the finger at some other country. With the "sustainable energy" approach, the prime motivation and beneficiary is the country getting in-house energy or making the new sources. Go figure.
There have been some small things that make progress. Number one in by book is technology transfer including subsidies to develop CCS. But this is mainly an agreement to come to a future agreement, and a continuation of Kyoto but losing canada, as it would have to pay large fines if it were not pull out of the treaty. None of this is suprising though.
Editorial in paper yesterday talked about what it would take to roll back GHG emissions in CA to 1980 levels (my numbers may be off, but it's the gist that counts). Said a very large amount of cars would need to be all electric and something like 30 new nuclear power plants would need to be built. Basically the article concluded the CA targets will not even be close to being met.
+1 A Scottish friend sent me this link. On climate change, the message is simple: get it done | Amy Goodman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk There is some of the most strong finger pointing, especially since the text seems to claim it is already too late to avert disaster. I am of a different opinion, that the doomsayers are wrong, that 2 degrees Celsius is not a magic number. If you think this is true than there is still time, and progress can be made. US can do more but this agreement to agree in the future slows down progress, as does the finger pointing.
I hope not. If the opinions of people like gore are right, we are doomed! Doomed those opinions say. So why try? I would like to reduce ww ghg levels to 50% of todays level by 2050. Others think we should blame someone, and pretend we always have a short number of years then we are doomed. Climate: Time's Up - we will always have ten years 1989 + 15= doomed in 2004 2006+10=doomed in 2016 2008+10=doomed in 2018 I know gore said again this year that we only have 10 years. That makes it 2021 until we are doomed. The US has been reducing ghg during the second bush term and obama's. The guardian would like to blame obama for the failure. In fact the kyoto group + the US have reduced ghg emissions 7.5% since the treaty. What should be clear is China will be increasing ghg no matter what the US or Canada do with their own emissions. The key to reducing china's future emissions is technology. Canada pulled out of Kyoto. Did they doom the world? I don't think so, but all this doomed talk makes it less likely the US, China, Canada, India, or Russia (likely to pull out of kyoto) will move as fast as they would otherwise. http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/6179 This was the doom reason gore is now blaming obama for the doom. Now if he had actually negotiated a treaty that would have slowed china's ghg growth instead of negotiating a bill that the senate had voted 95-0 beforehand to reject if it did not include Asia, things might be different. If we are doomed, it is because some of the worlds politicians did not understand the children's story of the "boy who cried wolf". As Snoop Dizzle says
It's never too late to stop making the problem worse. As for 'doomed'...well, everybody dies. Whether humanity itself survives long enough to develop intelligence and be considered an evolutionary success, it's too soon to say.
But that is what I meant in IMHO, we can still make the situation worse or better. I am not of the opinion that Armageddon is coming just around the corner. That is the opinion that I disagree with. You see those people with signs at sporting events, and now at climate conferences Its important to understand how scientific the 2 degree limit is. This is the limit of doom so we are told, and afaik if the GCM are correct it is already too late to stop it. Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
I don't think any rational person is suggesting that AGW is going to cause the end of the world, or even the end of human life. What many of us are saying is that 2-4C average increase in global average temperature over the remainder of the century, will lead to changes on a scale that will create significant hardship for humans,,,not to mention other species that we don't seem to care too much about. Icarus
Two degrees (above 1850 pre-industrial) is a goal for some. Returning to 350 ppm CO2, or halting the increase at 450 is a goal for others. No such goals necessarily indicate a safe limit that we dare not cross, because the behaviours of positive feedbacks (including Amazon forest dieback, northern soils CO2 and CH4 evasion, soil warming /CO2 evasion in general, and Arctic sea ice/albedo) remain inadequately understood. Inadequately studied, I'd like to say, but research costs money and there appears to be not much more available for this purpose. So, we could draw any of the above lines, aim global net CO2 release to not pass the line, and still maybe get some undesired positive feedbacks. Or with the wisdom of another decade or two, we might find that the real line we don't want to cross is actually higher. All that may be a purely academic discussion, because the large and mid emitters are mostly doing business as usual. As I have suggested before, that may turn out to be 'no regrets' or it may turn out otherwise. Some degree of emissions slowing seems prudent to many, not the least because we could always burn more later should we find that 'the coast is clear'. But that is not the path we currently tread. A different but related line has been suggested regarding agriculture. That we should only use 15% of global land surface for this purpose, and let the rest go back to forest. That would be about half of the current. I only mention it to illustrate that there are many 'lines', and they are frequently far away from our current path. The paper that suggested it was published in Nature, about 2008 and if anyone wants to read it, let me know.
Icarus, James Hansen has suggested that extensively tapping Canadian (and other) tar sands and shale oil would put us on an 'end of the world' path. Eventually volatilizing the oceans and making the Earth like Venus. That may or may not be realistic, but losing the oceans would be doom. It did not happen during the PETM, and that was a pretty large temperature spike. Thus I am not quite as doomy on the point as Hansen is. Adding to my previous, there was a recent issue of Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lindon devoted to consequences of 4 oC increase. Those papers were pretty doomy as well.
Ichy, I'm glad you are not on board with the doomsayers. If you look at my link above you will see this Add gore who is this link said to the senate foreign relations committee [ame=http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a55_1233194141]LiveLeak.com - Al Gore: Earth is Doomed Again, I mean it this time![/ame] I would call all three of these people - hansen, rottgen, and gore - rational, but they all are saying we are doomed. Others have been joining the chorus. Understanding that there are ways to mitigate damage and use technology are important to reduce the worst outcomes. Durban has been a failure, like kyoto, Copenhegen, etc to get commitments for meaningful world wide ghg reductions.
This year may be turning point in approach due to Japan Tsunami. Some always felt a shift to nuke plants might save the planet. Now its probably clear that is not going to happen in the next 50? years anyway. This may force into a long term approach. Human pop exceeding 7 billion is mind boggling and causes many eco-problems. The funny thing about AGW, to some extent, is perhaps the notion that that particular population-related problem can somehow be isolated and solved. I keep coming back to resource conservation is vital to supply future generations (metals/oil/etc)...and that's a longer term issue.
Please define "doom". A world that I can envision with 2-4C averge temp rise is not one that I would wish on my (metaphoric) grandchildren thank you very much! Icarus
I continue to be hopeful that we will find solutions, but I don't pretend to know what they are. I have a few ideas that would help, but I don't realistically expect them to be implemented any time soon, because they require the sacrifice of current wealth and power for the sake of long term planetary health. So far, individually and collectively, we don't seem to be very good at doing that. With steadily increasing consumption, exponentially increasing population, a flawed economic system, and finite resources, failure is an option. Don't shoot the messenger - do something to increase the chances of success.
tochatihu and I gave you 3 examples from the doom predictions. I am saying that I am not buying this version of Armageddon. I'm not sure why you have metaphoric grandchildren or what you are wishing on them. My father always told me that life wasn't fair. If you find the gcm and economic models relevant, which I do, than at least 2 degrees is unavoidable. 0.7 degrees are already recorded. As my jump instructor told me if you have a bad chute no amount of swearing or preying is going to fix it, you need to deal with the situation. My grandfather told me how bad life used to be, and he came from a colder place, its hard for me to believe with life as good as it is down here, that another 1.3 degrees is going to make things as bad as they used to be. Others grew up more fortunate and long for the past, but its never going to be that way again. I would love to get a hold of the problem and have some worth while reductions in ghg. I don't think blaming obama or china does anyone any good, but realities of the world economies must be taken into account. Stories of the devil or 2 degree disaster won't put humpty dumpty back together again.
Doom predictions are easy to get swallowed into. Now if we take a step back and see why previous doom predictions have not occurred on the scale predicted, it's because we as did a lot of the right things when needed. The green revolution, the Montreal Protocol, Nuclear Armageddon, etc. are just some examples. In every one of those case the problem was quite real, but so were the actions to address the situation. So while climate effects may be significant, and to some extent unavoidable, we are addressing the energy, agricultural, population, and disease issues. Most of this is starting to happen now, but just like the examples above, the key steps are below the media radar.
Doom, to lesser degrees, was predicted several times by ecologists (or at least, ecological activists). Some examples provided by FL-Prius_Driver. Others include isotope release from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, insecticides, acid rain, phosphorus release to the environment. This is by no means a complete list. In each of those cases, the activists were roundly beat up for crying wolf. In addition, governments took steps to address the issues. I think that the list of successes is pretty good, even though the green revolution has substantially increased nitrogen pollution of surface waters (while also avoiding - or at least postponing - the "Club of Rome" and Paul Ehrlich global famines). In those cases, crying wolf couldbe assailed as poor technique, but I would not be so sure that the cries did not catalyse the good things that happened. Now we may be at a similar juncture. Climate change does possess wolf-criers, although my list may not coincide exactly with others' lists. Our responses so far have included many useful things (especially related to energy efficiency), but one could argue that they have not gone far enough. Well, when will they? When (if?) enough people recognize that there is an important problem that requires a large and concerted response. When and if that happens, I am by no means sure that the vilification of today's wold criers will persist. They might even been hailed as visionaries. My point above is that it has happened before.
