You can't appeal to everyone.
There's not a lot of things that I could personally do, and that really bums me out. While my life choices already contributed to at least one person not polluting the planet a lot (as an example, I don't drive a car and I don't use gas for heating), I don't see much more I can do about it.
I know I get my electricity from a coal plant, and I can't really save on electricity more than I am now. Recycling is something I'm doing as thoroughly as I can, but it's a bitch in a city where there are only two locations where I can dispose a recyclable waste.
I can't really do much more, and I'm not even reducing the waste at all. I'm just living my life avoiding to pollute the earth even more.
> On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
--Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5 [0]
Note especially: "So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
He necessarily implies that one must be dishonest in order to be "effective." This raises the question: effective at what? The answer is obvious: effecting their policy goals.
This raises other questions: If a policy goal requires dishonesty to garner public support, is it a worthy goal? Is it backed by sound reasoning and evidence?
Most importantly, why should the public trust such sweeping policy to a few people who have decided that they know better than everyone else, and are therefore entitled to lie to the uneducated masses, for their own good? Is that not authoritarian? Does not madness lie down this path, or are climate scientists immune to lapses in judgment and ethics and morals?
0: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96....
It won't cost all that much. Not doing it will cost a whole heck of a lot more.
It's possible that it would change 3% year-over-year productivity growth to 0.5%. That "it" might be the difference between a marginally healthy economy and "lost generations" and political upheaval.
The "give us the flight controls now or regret it for eternity" position is not necessarily wrong, but there's a real lack of credible evidence with useful confidence intervals that any given combination of approaches will have net desirable outcomes. And there's a justified (I think) lack of trust in that approach.
The entire situation is dire, so why don't we see more of a "full court press" on responding to the effects of climate change as well? Investments into dikes and levees, building above sea level more aggressively, more aggressive weatherproofing, relocating populations from increasingly arid to increasingly temperate places, etc.?
People worldwide are clearly more and more cynical about centralized seats of power (Washington, Brussels, Davos, etc.), so why are we saying the solution to all this is more special interests (say, 'yes' to American batteries, 'no' to French nuclear tech), more regulation, and more bureaucracy?
Alternative plan:
If the problem is carbon in the air, just implement and gradually ramp up a (progressive) tax on that, provide a phased-in minimum income to offset general cost-of-living increases, and then just play with those knobs until emissions hit desirable levels.
Just imposing it on the developed world would help some, but any benefit would be at least partially offset by emissions-heavy industry shifting further to the developing (and higher emissions-intensive) nations.
Worse, people are calling people with concerns about subsidizing, say, certain battery companies (at the expense of alternative approaches and competing battery companies) as "global warming skeptics" and "anti-science". As if subsidizing particular avenues of R&D is a scientifically objective question.
You aren't a starving peasant in Bangladesh, dude.
Reducing energy consumption to any significant degree will doom millions of people to an unpleasant death.
And no, solar and wind won't do it. At least not earth-based solar. Space-based solar might do the trick, but the risks and costs would be extremely high.
There is exactly one feasible alternative to fossil fuels, and that is nuclear.
Choose your pick.
2. You don't get to advocate the end of fossil fuels by spreading disaster scenarios while ignoring the very real human costs that would result from what you are advocating.
2. If you want to talk about "real human costs" of climate policy, you might want to pick a country that is not built upon a coastal flood plain that is routinely flooded[1]: Bangladesh is going to be among the countries hit hardest by climate change[2].
It makes me suspect that you don't care about human costs at all. On the other hand it did help me writing this rebuttal, so I guess all is well after all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh
> In 1998, over 75% of the total area of the country was flooded, including half of the capital city Dhaka. ... 30 million people were made homeless and the death toll reached over a thousand.
[2] Same page
> The difference between historical and projected average temperatures each season throughout the world has revealed that harvests from major staple crops could drop by 40 percent by the end of the 21st century due to high temperatures in the growing seasons.
Well, I actually do care about people. So, there's that.
"In 1998, over 75% of the total area of the country was flooded, including half of the capital city Dhaka. ... 30 million people were made homeless and the death toll reached over a thousand."
That's sad, all right. How many routinely died in famines before the advent of modern, high-energy, mechanized agriculture?
Hint: a lot more than a thousand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
Try ten million. And that was just one such event. They were routine in the days before mechanized agriculture and mechanized food transport. Happened all the time. Note that the article tries to blame this on the British (and they do appear to have been rather callous), but the primary cause was the failure of the monsoon. Nowadays if a monsoon fails you can truck in food from somewhere else. You can't do that without fossil fuels or some equivalent. Not to any real degree.
"It makes me suspect that you don't care about human costs at all. "
I'm not the one who wants to sentence the bulk of the human race to a preindustrial scenario involving periodic mass starvation. So, no.
Until you actually demonstrate functional and economic alternatives, that is exactly what it means.
Yes. Climate change proponents post articles such as the OP here and then cry "The sky is falling, the sky is falling and I can prove it! We're at the 410 PPM Threshold, just as we predicted!"
Whether the down-voters like it or not, climate change is a very real and scientifically established fact, but what that will do to people on the world is not a scientific fact. It's just what currently most people predict will happen (and disagreeing with this is feels like some kind of thought crime in the traditional sense--it's not science). The world is not going to end. Biodiversity and Biomass is decreasing. The Northwest Passage is being opened up. Iron fertilization will become a more likely policy to sequester carbon and increase biomass in the oceans. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather patterns most likely will increase. Productive farm land may or may not increase. Russia actually may have a fair bit to gain from it. But the fact is, there is a lot we really don't know.
In the very long run our civilization will need to harvest as much energy from the sun as possible, but in the meantime we've done a pretty fantastic job of screwing up the planet, so it's a pretty good idea to stop emitting so much pollutants into our atmosphere, since we don't really know for sure, but we have a lot of reasons to think it won't be good. That's really the best argument to end climate change, but it's probably not convincing enough to change behavior in large numbers of people.
That said, the politics and bureaucracies around climate change have started to resemble the War on Poverty and War on Drugs--institutions which now exhibit bureaucratic intertia (have an inherent perverse incentive structure, and they rationally (evilly) place their own survival over that of solving the problems they're tasked with).
Guess what? The earth was just fine.
Humans will also be fine.
Or they could make things better.
"That's the interesting part of the problem, we don't have accurate models of all the side effects."
In fact, we do know that the CO2 level of the earth's atmosphere has been much higher in the past, and that this didn't produce anything like the "all life on earth dies" scenario that the doomsayers keep touting.
"Ecosystems are complicated and fragile."
The ecosystem survived the Chicxulub event, dude. It's not going to be knocked out by 410 ppm of CO2.
"Ecosystem" is not shorthand for "life exists on Earth somewhere." An ecosystem is a particular state of the dependencies between life forms.
The ecosystem that existed before the big asteroid strike was thoroughly and rapidly destroyed; a new ecosystem developed afterward. That's fine from a general "life finds a way" perspective, but it sucked for the sauropods, who went extinct.
EDIT: if you want a sense of why the indirect effects of anthropogenic climate change might be bad, look at the social unrest reacting to a couple million people migrating out of Syria. What do you think it's going to be like when about a billion people have to migrate inland due to sea level rise?
"What do you think it's going to be like when about a billion people have to migrate inland due to sea level rise?"
Considering that even the worst-case doom-crying scenarios issued by the IPCC predict a sea level increase of the order of 1 meter over the period of a century (i.e., ~1 cm per year), your (and Hollywood's) suggestion of rioting mobs fleeing the tsunami-like rising ocean is just not based in reality.
The fact that this is news to you is a clue that perhaps you know less about this subject than you think you do.
Hint: that means I won.
You claimed that the ecosystem "didn't survive" the Chicxulub event because there were different organisms afterward. I pointed out that by that "definition" the ecosystem has never "survived", because it has been in a state of constant change since day one.
Rather than responding to this, you just got nasty.
I repeat: I win. Sorry.
The question is, what do those changes mean for individual organisms? Because that's what you and I are.
Changes to the climate and ecosystem are like changes to velocity. Whether the change is good or bad for people depends on the magnitude and direction.
I do think that your focus on who is "winning" an imaginary Internet slap fight is detracting from your understanding.
So. Yes, the CO2 level has been much higher in the past. For instance, in the Cambrian period it was much higher than it is now. ... And, in the Cambrian, the surface temperature of the earth was about 7 degrees C higher than it is now.
As someone else remarked: no, "the ecosystem" did not survive the Chicxulub event. Life survived it, sure, but it wiped out the dinosaurs (other than the birds). That's kinda a big deal.
What we choose to do with that knowledge is anthropocentric because we are humans.
Science can tell us how fire works. We still have to decide what to do when our house catches on fire.
A problem with that argument is that the sun was about 20% dimmer back then. Hence it may get hotter this time around.
According to wikipedia[1], the Sun increases in brightness steadily about 1% every 100M years, yet we had CO2 levels 10 times higher than now about 500M years ago.
The article itself is quite clear about this: e.g., it quotes one climate scientist as saying "These milestones are just numbers, but they give us an opportunity to pause and take stock and act as useful yard sticks for comparisons to the geological record." I suspect it's the usual story: journalist writes reasonable article, sub-editor puts needlessly overexcited headline on it.