I have been thinking about the breadth of attitudes towards global warming. The topic has been under public discussion for thirty years or more, yet still does not appear to provide us with definitive direction.
There are deniers. Deniers fail to accept the indisputable science that there is human induced global warming. Whatever evidence they look at, does not present to them the view that the world is warming. I make a distinction between the claims of science and any mitigation proposals. Deniers deny the claims, and therefore the need for any substantive mitigation.
There was a recent article in the Financial Post, actually an op-ed, claiming that Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, was grossly negligent in claiming that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has happened and is happening. One hundred and twenty-five scientist signatories (few of them with climate credentials) claim that there has been no evident warming in the last fifteen to twenty years.
The web site slate.com published a rebuttal in which, for example, it claimed that whereas a simplistic view of the last fifteen to twenty years suggests no substantive warming, the trend line going back fifty years and more is clearly upward, with the warmest years on record occurring in the last ten. Further the overwhelming force of scientific opinion, 99%+, is that man is to blame. Numbers alone do not make it true, but as with any scientific claim, the probability of it not being so is now vanishingly small.
And there are alarmists. Alarmists fully accept the claims of global warming, and are horrified of the implications, to the point that they are seriously alarmed that the impacts will be if not terminal to human life, certainly devastating.
The forecasts are of considerable change to our biological sustaining systems. We, humans, are dependent on a sustaining environment. We need water and temperate living conditions. We need food. We need a planet that refreshes itself in such a way as to keep our living conditions tolerable. The forecasts that have been made are alarming in that they forecast dramatic changes in these conditions. Temperate bands move northward in the northern hemisphere, and southward in the southern. The tropics may become inhospitable not only to human life, but to many many other lifeforms. We are losing, and will continue to lose corals from our oceans through acidification of the seas. We will lose crop lands, through desertification. The rise in temperature will give us both a loss of ice and a corresponding rise in sea levels. Together these will result in large swaths of many low lying countries being submerged with loss of both habitat for people as well as livelihoods. Let alone loss to and of our fellow-travelling biota.
These forecasts may be extreme. We have no way of knowing. There is reason behind them. There is evidence of similar periods in earth's history, when dramatic changes in climate forced major species extinction events. We know we are losing species at a rapid rate today. But this alone does not give certainty to the extreme forecasts. Perhaps Sandy and Hazel will convince some.
And there are also fatalists. Fatalists are not necessarily alarmists, though they may be close. A fatalist, accepting the science of global warming, basically says OK, dont lets worry about it. Yes, the planet may be going to hell in a hand basket, but so what? Let's enjoy the ride while we may.
Neither the alarmist nor the fatalist approach seems particularly constructive. The fatalist approach, by not developing any explicit mitigation for AGW may actually accelerate the destruction we have begun.
Then there are climate optimists: yes we are ruining the planet, but we can survive the changes and will exuberantly do so. I think of Sir Richard Branson in this context: unremittingly optimistic that we will find the solutions to the challenges which global warming presents. We do not need to mitigate since we can and will adapt to the change. We may need to curtail our profligate ways, we may in fact be forced by other factors to do so, but it is too late to reverse the changes and therefore must adapt in order to survive.
I dont know. Perhaps we will be forced to adapt, but even then I dont know if we will succeed in maintaining our current lavish civilised style. I like to think I am a realist, and certainly wish for a sustained existence for homo sapiens. But I see some serious constraints that will soon impose their limits on our civilization:
1. There are too many of us. Already, 7 billion people and counting. Forecasts are that we will have between 9 and 15 billion by late this century -- unless things change. They will have to change since there is not enough arable land to feed 7 billion today, we have exhausted the resources of the sea, and we cannot destroy more forests without impacting the overall climate we depend on. So while there are too many of us today, there have to be fewer of us in the future. While that may be realizable, I do not see enough of us joining Jim Jones communities, and drinking laced KoolAde. Without serious strife, our global population as too big.
2. Growth is actually impossible. Our global economy inextricably depends on annual positive growth. The use of money requires that more is produced each period than the one before. Our stock markets depend on quarterly improvements in revenues and profits. We are critically dependent on growth to the point that economic depressions are cause for serious problems. But any binomial growth exhausts the available resources.
Thus with a finite resource continual growth is impossible. The earth is finite in size, though for most of our history this has not been evident. There has always been a new world into which we can expand. Whenever a mineral is mined, there is less available to be consumed later. The more that is mined the sooner we will run out. If we run out, we cannot produce any more, and growth will stumble and halt.
Some will say, ah but we can always find an alternative. True, but that alternative is still subject to the same law of diminishing returns. We are seeing this with the so-called shale oil plays today. It appears that we have discovered vast new reserves of oil and gas in the shale deposits of the world. They will run out as the traditional oil fields have run out, and maybe faster. What we forget is that the oil shales are harder to extract than oil from traditional fields. That is the cost of extraction is such that we are closer to the a nil net return: it will cost a barrel to extract a barrel. Therefore it costs us more of what is extracted to extract what we get, such that the resource depletes faster.
Without a net increase in the input of primary energy we cannot grow.
3. Human nature is against us. In all the discussions of global warming, of carbon taxes, of additional resources, of asteroid mining etc, it seems to me that we forget about our fundamental nature. By far the majority of us couldnt care less about global warming. If we dont care, we will not be engaged (let alone enraged!) to do anything about it. Its not that we dont care, we are unaware. It is not relevant to our daily lives of working to earn a living to survive another day. We are stuck in a groove, be it of commuting to a miserable menial job, or commuting to run a gigantic corporation. The status quo is what is important. And will always be. We are fundamentally selfish and cannot see beyond the end of our noses.
So I dont know if that's a realist position or a pessimist position. Its mine. I will continue to drive my SUV and go on deep southern cruises. Its what I enjoy doing.
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