This is technically true, but I think it misses the point.
It's like complaining about Jeff Bezos being financially irresponsible because he bought a yacht. It might be financially irresponsible for you or me to buy a yacht, but Jeff Bezos's bank account is much bigger, and refills much more rapidly.
It's true that the natural carbon cycle involves a lot of sequestered carbon being released into the air, but nature actually consumes a little bit more carbon than it emits. If we left the natural carbon cycle alone, atmospheric carbon would decline.
Human industry is fundamentally the opposite. We emit CO2, but we don't sequester it in any significant way. Nature may pump more CO2 into the air than we do, but it also absorbs far more than we do. In fact, once nature consumes all of its own CO2, it consumes roughly 40% of what we put out there. The remaining 60% of our output is why atmospheric carbon keeps increasing.
Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.
Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.
My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.
But it's sure becoming a popular theory.
Also: I think what you're describing might be the broken window fallacy: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...
Are you saying that human-caused global warming is a hoax?
The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.
The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.
It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.
If they used a formalized series of IOUs that allowed for the long term planning of capital then I'd be more inclined to call it currency. But sounds like an interesting book, may have to give it a read.
And yes, it's the latter: formalized debt records that meet the 3 criteria we commonly define money by.
It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions and efficiency (and thus CO2 emissions). What you decide the tradeoff to be, is influenced by how much you thing climate change is a problem.
Another example is endangered species. If we really are going to have catastrophic global warming, then maybe we don't try as aggressively to protect all species from habitat destruction say from building hydroelectric, wind, solar power plants in Africa.
Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits.
Not for the entrenched interests, obviously. Happily, everyone else who's been paying their externalized costs (taxpayers, consumers) benefits.
Optimize the whole system. Localized optimization leads to decreased overall efficiency.
That's a broad generalization and far simpler model than what the poster is referring to.
Yes, riding a motorcycle instead of an SUV decreases all emissions. This is the simple base case.
However driving a diesel SUV decreases CO2 but increases NOx wrt to a gasoline one. This is the higher-order effect.
1. Most CO2 release is natural
2. We increased CO2 through our own efforts as well
3. [implied statement you may agree with: this led to a feedback loop]
4. We now may be too late to stop it merely by reducing emissions, if planetary emissions of stored carbon take over and become the main source of CO2 emissions
Is that what you were saying? You're getting downvotes because your first statement, while technically true, isn't very profound. Natural carbon emissions were counterbalanced by natural carbon storage.
But that might not be true if our additional emissions have triggered enough feedback loops.
We did increase the circulating amount by a very small margin. Large enough so that it accumulated over the years.
This of course led to a feedback loop.
Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2] If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.
For civilization to survive, we must adapt, mitigate, or both.
Thats the science. And it doesn't sound like extinction to me.
Yes, extinction seems unlikely. But the planet's ability to support the current population could easily be a casualty.
It's already happening. Natalia Shakhova has been studying this for years.
But since we pushed the system to a new state, its net emissions may dwarf our own emissions. Then things get even harder.
One theory is that agriculture prevented another mini-ice age. I don't know where in the "believe, but cannot prove" spectrum this theory lies (a la http://edge.org).
"Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate."
Complex adaptive systems. Disrupt a system's equilibrium and you get chaos. Hard to predict, mitigate.
"Amplifiers that oscillate and oscillators that won't are the two great fears of analog designers."
Technically an amplifier with a feedback mechanism can become an oscillator and if you break the feedback loop in an oscillator you end up with 'just' an amplifier.
To make this even more interesting: a negative feedback element in an amplifier will greatly enhance the frequency response at the expense of amplification (and will vastly reduce the chances of that amplifier turning into an oscillator).
The first statement, that human industry is not "the main cause of co2 release," is undisputed fact. This is what the DOE says [1]:
"Natural CO2 sources account for the majority of CO2 released into the atmosphere."
and
"Carbon dioxide comes from both natural and anthropogenic sources; natural sources are predominant."
[1] https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon...
The important part is that anthropogenic sources are a significant contribution to the net imbalance of those flows, because it's all in one direction.
It's like arguing that your spending, because is a small fraction of the amount of money you move between your checkings and savings accounts, won't make you run out of money...
Jesus is a myth. The above statement is not something any thinking person has ever considered. You'd have to be a moron to think CO2 only comes from human source. Of course CO2 predates mankind, as well as mandkind's activities. Positioning something that no one is claiming as if it's something someone is claiming and then knocking it down, is known as a strawman, it is not a myth. But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier.
The concern is not the source or reason for historic CO2 levels, it's the source and reason for increases above historic CO2 levels.
Treating people as if they're too stupid to see through such transparent attempts at distraction should be a violation of the code of conduct, before name calling those who try to get away with shit like this.
I assume you refer to Rick Perry. In point of fact the myth/reality portion of the page has been unchanged since at least September of 2015 [1], at which time Obama appointee Ernest Moniz was Secretary of Energy. Dr. Moniz has never denied the fact that the climate is changing, as far as I'm aware.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150912221729/https://www.netl....
Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all.
> "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference.
Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.