> We are SOL on climate change anyway

I understand that this is wrong, and I know it's part of the messaging campaign of climate change deniers (which doesn't make it wrong, but does raise questions about it). First they said it isn't happening, then it isn't caused by humans, then it costs too much to fix, then there is nothing we can do about it. It's just one fallback position after another.

Climate change is a problem of degree; it's not binary. It can be better or worse, depending on what actions we take. The global temperature can rise 2 deg or 2.5 deg or more or less. The sea levels can rise X feet or X+1 feet or more or less. Droughts and can be more or less long and severe. These are very significant differences.

The government could eliminate poverty if everyone was willing to make significant sacrifices to do so. But it won't happen because the necessary changes would be politically untenable. Climate change is the same. No President is going to make the kind of significant investments necessary to have a meaningful impact on climate change. The Paris Accord is a merely symbolic bit of goal setting. It does not provide an infrastructure for how to achieve the goal, or commit any real resources to doing so.

In terms of national priorities, even among Democrats, climate change takes a back seat to (1) jobs; (2) pensions; (3) education; and (4) healthcare. At the same time, it'll require a bigger change to the economy than any of those things.

I guess we need some research to back up how much it would cost. My understanding is that experts in the field widely believe we can afford to make a significant impact, and that the costs of climate change are far greater than the costs of preventing it.

I think the grandparent's point is that it doesn't matter whether it's technically possible for us to prevent climate change, it's politically impossible even with a Democrat as president. Which I hope is not true, but with Trump in office it seems all the more probable.

There is a big gap between what we can afford and what we are willing to commit. We could probably have a modest impact with a couple of hundred billion a year in investment (equivalent to the home mortgage interest deduction). We could afford it. But I think it's unthinkable we'll get even a few tens of billions a year for climate change. At that point, there are much higher value ways to spend our limited environmental dollars.

Again, we need something to back up your numbers.

But the costs happen at different times. We are already paying some of the cost of climate change, but what we're currently paying is far less than the cost of prevention. It is a short-term vs. long-term problem, and unfortunately short-term thinking is ascendant.

What you are saying is the cost of keeping human life on this planet is too high?

And that even simple steps like not subsidizing coal, when natural gas is cheaper and there for responsible for the decrease in coal mining, it too expensive of a step?

>climate change deniers

>climate change is a problem

Do you "deny" that climate change can have non-problematic effects?

Can a temperature increase in one area be beneficial? Can a drought in one area mean more water in another area?

Insofar as it's part of many runaway processes modeled [1] [2], no I don't think so.

Or to put it in more stark: whatever minor benefits exist are outweighed by the massive risks to mid-long term survival of the human race.

Some think we can simply out-evolve/adapt these changes. That, to me, stinks of hubris.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect

What evidence is there that there could be a runaway greenhouse effect on any non-astronomical timescale?

There is no sense in rehashing the same old 'climate change 101' arguments and data here. If you were truly interested in, and knowledgeable on, the subject, you would know exactly what evidence there is and we would be discussing the merits of the evidence. As it is, you cannot be distinguished from the average parrot or troll.

Anyone who does not at least agree that there is evidence that is worrying and worth discussing does not know enough about the subject to be having opinions and posing suggestive questions about it. If you don't at least start with: hey, I understand you are not a total idiot and I understand how it may seem like there is strong anthropogenic climate change going on, but here is why I think that that is not the case, then discussion is pointless.

Look up the IPCC reports; they have the answers to your questions.

"For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus-- appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities" (p. 90)

http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf

Thanks; that's useful. A couple notes:

* It's from 2009

* It's not an official report or conclusion, but appears to be more of a discussion aimed at "scoping" the next report.

Still, it's far better than what previously informed our discussion here.

The general scientific consensus is that any localized benefits are far outweighed by global detriments, such as rising sea levels, mass crop failure, animal extinction, etc.

War, famine, massive migration.

What evidence is there that climate change could cause more war than it could prevent?

What evidence is there that climate change could cause more famine than it could increase crop yield?

Why is migration undesirable?

Migration is undesirable because people don't like migration.

Have you been paying attention at all to European or American politics? Even the very small amount of migration being driven by the Syrian civil war has caused massive amounts of discontent and unrest in the richest nations on Earth. Now imagine whole regions full of people wanting to move because rainfall patterns change, or sea level rise displaces them.

Social unrest is the biggest risk that climate change creates. People like things the way they are, and get very upset when they think things are going to change.

How about Syria

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059....

I like to carefully consider a consensus of any group which primarily depends on a single source, in this case government grants, for its paychecks.

Evidence-based consensus is good, and I am primarily interested in the evidence.

What evidence is there that rising sea levels will cause more harm than benefit?

What evidence is there that there can't be more crop production at more northern, theoretically then warmer, altitudes?

What evidence is there that there can't be increased animal diversity as previously colder areas become more habitable to different species?

> What evidence is there that there can't be more crop production at more northern, theoretically then warmer, altitudes?

A common misunderstanding of global warming is the belief that all points on Earth will see their temperature rise by the same amount.

The average temperature will rise, but many regions of Earth will actually see their temperature go down. Unfortunately, those regions are already not particularly warm, like Antarctica.

Northern regions of Earth have their temperature heavily tied to the amount of sunlight they receive. While they will indeed get warmer compared to now, they will still be cold, and there is nothing that can be done about the six months of night time. Going to Siberia is not the answer, no matter how much you like Mr Putin.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Projecte...

As for rising sea levels: for obvious reasons, settlements near the sea are common. Rebuilding all those cities will be a tremendous cost. Human migration will also be politically straining, which may cause a part of the US to secede. Immigration tends to irritate people for some reason. A famous US president was recently elected thanks to that resentment.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/6m_Sea_L...

As for wildlife, rapid changes in temperature are correlated with mass extinction according to the fossil record. In fact, we are already currently undergoing a mass extinction, which is expected to go on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#Global_war....

So wait, let me get this straight. You're asking if any evidence exists refuting your questions, excepting the entirety of the output of the community dedicated to studying the problem?

I am looking for evidence so that humans can draw wise conclusions.

I point out that a group of people who are employed primarily by a single source are going to generate opinions that are favorable to that source.

If they don't, they are handicapping their ability to put food on the table. Work can still be found without catering to the primary source, but it's not as financially beneficial to do so.

Most scientific studies are not funded to give those that paid for it false information to make them feel good. It is to get actual scientific data. You can lie to yourself in a bubble for much cheaper than paying teams of scientists to make up a fake reality for your own ego.

True, but there is a significant risk of false information if the sponsor then can financially gain. For example, if the U.S. government felt that belief in climate change would be economically advantageous, they could pressure local researchers to find in favor of climate change. It seems unlikely that the Chinese government would have a mechanism to issue U.S. grants, however.

This happens all the time in marketing. Although, to be fair, those studies are often preceded by a number of more accurate private studies, and only the publicized one is suspect.

The U.S. government decidedly does NOT think climate change is economically advantageous, and they have fought any measures against it tooth and nail.

If so, that would be a good explanation for some of the publicly funded research that finds climate change nonexistent or unimpactful.

By that logic, consensus should be the only thing you would trust. Paying people for new findings disincentivizes consensus, unless perhaps those people have several avenues to explore and are willing to close off some of the less promising ones - again in favor of consensus being trustworthy.

there is no evidence that you are looking for evidence.

> Thank you for telling us the consensus of people who literally depend on government grants for their paychecks.

It's a loose, circumstantial, conspiratorial aspersion, which has nothing to do with the facts of climate change. Maybe they could make more by providing credibility to the oil and gas industry.

Again, look up IPCC reports. We're not a forum of climate scientists. I believe gravity also exists; I haven't read the papers myself and don't have time to find them.

You would not be using the internet were it not for research done by scientists on government grants, moron.

Nor would your or your loved ones' lives be saved next time you're in the hospital.

You can't call other users morons here.

There's nothing wrong with government grants.

I only point out that there is an incentive to agree with the hand that feeds you. This goes for labs employed by industry as well.

If there was any incentive, it would be to deny the problem - after all, discovering global warming leads to the prospect of having to do expensive and unpopular things about it.

If a climatologist "denies" that climate change is a problem, there will be less government spending on researching that problem. Furthermore, he won't get a job from the purse that thinks it's a problem - generating data that shows that it isn't a problem would take away the purse's job too.

You seem to be conflating the benefits of society with the benefits of a living, breathing academic who has kids to feed and bills to pay. There is no conscious "government" - there are only conscious individual actors.

What do you think 'researching that problem' actually involves? Do you think scientists are just paid to sit there and type out bullshit reports?

No, they have to produce real, scientific studies which are peer reviewed by other scientists all over the world. If there's a bullshit study, that's usually quickly discredited and the scientist's reputation damaged. (See: Andrew Wakefield)

You're also living in a delusional world where scientists are not in high demand and can't find a much higher paying job at a private corporation, if they wanted to.

Doing science for a government contract is a step down for most scientists.

These are highly trained, skilled, educated, and intelligent people you're talking about.

While scientists will express their opinions of the data and findings of a study, the scientific method is not an op-ed piece. The great thing about science is that a study comes with a thesis, a description of assumptions, a discussion of the experimental design, data, analysis of data, and a discussion of the conclusions. Other scientists can check the work, both via peer review at the publishing stage, and by judging and reproducing the work after publication. If they believe there's a problem with the experimental design, they can describe the problem. If they believe there's something wrong with the data, or the analysis of the data, they can explain what's wrong. Or run new experiments that demonstrate what's wrong, and publish those studies in turn. This process does create a bias of sorts, but it's the right kind: a bias toward wanting to be shown to be thorough, professional, neutral, and logical in the drawing of conclusions -- and have one's work hold up to attempts at refutation by other scientists, including those with a strong desire to prove the conclusion is wrong.

If a scientist is biased by having an employer with an agenda, and that bias manifests in a study, then that study can be exposed as faulty by other scientists. That's how science works. So unless you believe a global cabal of thousands of scientists and their many different employers are all somehow coordinated in their unwillingness to judge each other's studies as flawed, you must give credence to the overwhelming support among scientists for the idea of anthropogenic climate change.

Likewise, if you believe the multitude of studies is flawed, then go ahead and show how. Pick any couple of dozen and have at it. There are plenty of employers with a strong and admitted bias against global warming (e.g. the oil and gas industry), and they employ scientists. If those scientists produce irrefutable studies disproving anthropogenic climate change, then that would become the accepted science, and those scientists would be viewed as luminaries in the field.

As for the cabal: unfortunately, many believe in exactly that -- including, nominally, President-elect Trump, who has stated climate change is a "hoax". I doubt he believes it's literally a hoax, but I don't doubt he understands that acceptance of the science threatens the bank accounts of those making money from the implicated processes. The same people driving the regulatory capture process, plowing money into congressional elections, etc. The real cabal is the force against the science.

There are so few studies leaning in the other direction that it should be easy to choose an "unfairly" discredited one and expose its field-wide refutations as illogical and biased.

In other posts, you make a big deal of evidence, so where is your evidence here?

Borders don't conveniently move. Uninhabitable deserts aren't a good thing.

Do not pretend that you have made any attempt to find answers to these questions.

Rapidly shifting environmental conditions usually lead to less, not more, animal diversity, because of invasive species and ecosystem collapse. Greater temperatures are associated with greater biodiversity overall, but this would be of foreign species.

The corner cases are not significant in comparison to the majority cases, and it is not rational to pretend otherwise.

Beneficial effects for humanity? Yes, the rate of change we're heading for is way too high for anything humanity depends on to handle it, including our infrastructure.

Excess water is not beneficial. It isn't associated with social instability like drought is, but it does lead to loss of harvest.

> The coal alignment is a bigger deal than climate change. We are SOL on climate change anyway

We're SOL on stopping climate change, but what we're doing now will define how bad it gets, and the later we start the worse it will be and the harder the mitigation, as it has been since the 70s.

It's not a question of "SOL" or "token gestures" it's a question of how fast and how far it will go, and how much time we will have to handle such concerns as mass population displacements.

Not doing anything is a giant middle fingers to those who follow us, or for those of us who won't be dead within a generation (aka pretty much anyone other than the boomers), a middle finger to future us.

It's also a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Not necessarily if it becomes a runaway process. It doesn't matter how far you push the glass off the edge of the table, the milk spills all the same.

> The coal alignment is a bigger deal than climate change. We are SOL on climate change anyway (barring a scientific miracle)--there is no point worrying about whether one administration will or will not engage in token gestures.

I really want to push back on this. This is in fact an anti-climate-change talking point used to say, "Look it just doesn't matter what we do." While it's true that the destabilizations currently taking place are absolutely a part of our lifetime, in the 200 year timeline the scientific consensus is that if we cut our emissions substantially within this century we will in fact avoid locking our descendents into a full climate flip that is NOT avoidable.

The canonical paper people quote about this is: http://www.ecoequity.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/meinshau...

We need to play an aggressive game before 2050, and we can save the ice caps. That is not a token gesture. That's the line that we can draw to not destroy every coastal city in the world.

This is absolutely not true. There is a huge difference between a 3 degree world and a 4 degree world. Yes, 2 degrees seems out of reach already, but the Paris agreement is considered a genuine breakthrough amongst many many people who fight for preventing climate change.

It's disingenuous to claim that there are only token gestures. Chinas commitment is real, Europes commitment is real, India is more questionable, but the Obama administrations actions through the EPA were also real.

Trumps win will cost us. It means many many more gigatonnes of CO2 in the air, that means a hotter planet, and that means more dead poor people. To the best of sciences ability to tell, THAT is reality.

I hate to, but I agree with you on all points, including the hopelessness of human nature suddenly pulling a 180 and changing our impact on climate change. The best thing I can offer is that you can't help people who act against their own best interests, and if this election proves anything, it's that compassion and concern is wasted on them.

Are they consciously acting against their own best interests?

Empathy, education and concession seems like our best chance.

To adapt a quote.... when they go low and don't realise it, you should still go high.

I believe that it's fear that drove people to Trump. With quotes like "they want to turn off the lights all over the world.” It isn't surprising that many on the right vote against their interests because they fear far worse from the other side.

It's not at all hopeless. We've pulled 180's in the 60's, the 90's and the 2010's already.

I'm from KY. According to NPR yesterday, McConnell himself has said that the easing of regulations and executive coal alignment is unlikely to create many coal jobs. Not sure if that was political posturing or not.

The "clean coal" that Trump has pushed for costs way too much money to create, transport, and responsibly store the solid carbon. Coal already has a price advantage when compared to natural gas.

However, I agree with you that the voters in Appalachia generally vote against their own interests. Usually for social reasons.

For those that don't know what SOL means (I had to look it up)... "S--t Outta Luck"

The urban dictionary is your best friend.

Duck duck go even have a bang command for it (!ud).

!u works too

I've also heard a less vulgar version of "sorry outa luck", the other ones better though.

I see, another adherent to prescriptive principles, in which case you missed the "out of" part.

"Outta" is frequently listed in dictionaries. "S--t" isn't. Try again.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/outta

Oh, so it's a matter of degree for prescriptivists is it? Got it.

>> You misspelled "shit"

ahh S--t, so I did

prova x

An absolutely awful cement plant in my town is in the final phase of switching from coal to nat-gas, and it is wonderful. On cold windless days my little town would be covered in a miasma of coal smoke. Regardless of fracking's other issues, it is a massive win against coal.

Are you aware of the implications of being SOL on climate change? A 6 degree rise in temperatures and we probably kill all phytoplanton - the source, along with kelp and algal planton of half our oxygen (ie. we all die).

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/phytoplankton-climate-kachur-1...

http://nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-bre...

"Clean coal" is the e-cigarettes of energy.

"And ironically, the voters in Appalachia being courted are bearing the brunt of it"

By "bearing the brunt" you mean "having jobs"? Have you asked them whether they would rather have jobs or not?

Also, they know perfectly well that closing their coal mines doesn't mean that coal doesn't get mined and burned. It just gets mined and burned in other countries where environmental regulations are non-existent.

The simplistic "coal is bad" thesis has a) put a huge number of Americans out of work and b) made the global environment worse.

> The simplistic "coal is bad" thesis has a) put a huge number of Americans out of work and b) made the global environment worse.

I'm confident you have sources on b.

"I'm confident you have sources on b."

Yes.

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=9751

1) China consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined.

2) Environmental regulations in China range from "minimal" to "non-existent". Do you need sources on that as well?

I am confused by this argument as it seems to be orthogonal to the point the GP was making, namely that coal does have a large impact on the global environment. Stating that China uses a lot of coal isn't exactly helping your case, considering that coal causes more air pollution deaths in China than any other source[1].

1. https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/wor...

China also has huge investments in solar and some of the worst pollution anywhere. They've hit peak coal and are apparently starting in the other direction [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...

According to Wikipedia, eletriciy generation from coal is at 73%. And it is questionable if they are at peak coal. If their electricity generation doubles and they reduce the percentage to 60%, they're going to be burning a lot of coal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

Yes, China does produce a lot of solar but what percentage of electricity is that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

You are speaking in generalities and not using hard data. That is no way to analyze a problem.

I'm not an expert in this issue or doing any analysis, and neither are you. I shared a link I thought was interesting. I'm sure there is better analysis out there if someone cares to look, but I'm not going to do that right now.

China is indeed 'greening' its economy to move to what it calls a Ecological Civilisation. This is a big development, and it goes lumpy but its government bodies coordination is improving. An example of which is the development of a Green Financial Systems (see this PBoC's link: http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english/130721/3131759/index.html)

How would this have changed if we were mining our own coal? If they're using an amount that far outstrips everyone else combined, the environmental damage would be largely the same with or without US coal.

1) A substantial portion of the Chinese coal is burned to produce steel and other products that are exported to the United States. 2) Burning that coal here (where there are environmental regulations) would produce less damage that burning it in China (where there are effectively none).

I'm not sure why this is confusing.

I'm also not sure why people are modding down factual posts. That type of behavior is exactly what's given you President Trump.

China exports 800 million tons of steel and the US only imports 1.9% of that. Burning coal here will have very little impact on China steel operations.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-russell-steel-china... http://www.ita.doc.gov/steel/countries/pdfs/imports-us.pdf

That's it! Keep making the bad facts go away!

Why have to choose between clean air to breathe, clean rain (rather than acid rain) to fill their lakes and reservoir and jobs?

We don't have to choose. Today's technology means that burning coal is clean. There are carbon dioxide emissions, but in terms of pollutants that make the air dirty, there is very little (carbon dioxide emission have climate impacts, but are not toxic or dirty).

There is NOT actually a clean coal plant that is operational in the US. I would not talk about this as how our coal plants currently operate. Attempts at putting a clean coal plant online have faced complications. Perhaps this why Clean Coal is called a myth?

http://fortune.com/2016/10/10/donald-trump-clean-coal/