This is a report that adds nothing to the original release from MIT and in fact fails to mention that these new predictions are based on actual observed data. Here's the original post from MIT:
The question isn't whether the earth is warming or not - it clearly is. The real question is what should humans do about it?
I think it's pretty reasonable to ask if trying to turn down the heat is the best use of our resources? That is, perhaps the incalculable trillions of dollars that it would cost to adjust the earth's climate would be better spent on helping humans adjust instead. Hell, there is significant evidence that a warmer climate would lead to an agricultural boom - which coincidentally is exactly what is going to be required to feed 7 billion humans.
Or look at it another way - what if it turned out tomorrow that the climate is warming because of solar activity? Would the environmentalist movement still be advocating that we try to prevent climate change?
Well, climate change is damaging to humanity, and if we can do something to prevent climate change that is less damaging to humanity, we should do it. Regardless of whether it's solar or anthropogenic. To be clear, though, it's very certain nowadays that much of the observed climate change is due to humans, primarily through emissions of greenhouse gases.
As far as incalculable trillions: really? For one, monetary figures don't really cover it. A Bengali life is economically worth a couple tens of thousands at most, while an American one is worth millions. Their well being isn't captured by purely economic measures. That doesn't mean we should trade hundreds of Bengalis to save one American. There's also the libertarian point of view that, no matter how many SUVs an American might want, that doesn't give him a right to destroy a Bengali's home without his or her consent.
It's easy to hypothesize maybe some alternative policy response that involves a massive Marshall plan to... well, all the world. Do you think that's even vaguely plausible, though? I can't speak to European politics, but within America the chance of that ever happening is zero. Nada. Nil. No one wants to pay taxes even for their own schools and roads, let alone handouts, let alone foreign aid.
Why is it that most people who are concerned about the effects of climate change and invested in dealing with it think that pushing for more prevention is the best use of their efforts, not mitigation? I assume you wouldn't say they're all stupid.
Lastly, it's extremely controversial to suggest that the costs of prevention outweigh either (a) the costs of climate change itself or (b) the costs of mitigation. Unlikely, even--many places that use far less energy per capita than we do are hardly anti-technological dystopias.
Reasonable environmentalists aren't advocating that we prevent climate change. The earth's climate changes. It always has and always will. There is nothing we can do to prevent the natural cycles the earth goes through.
What we need to adjust is our unnatural, unbalanced effect on the earth's climate.
Why do we need to? Just because it is unnatural and you are philosophically opposed to it? Or are you saying something about the fact that the temperature change is driven by humans rather than nature makes it a problem?
The distinction is one of knowledge. We have evidence that that the environment as it exists now, is a relatively stable regime. The climate has changed throughout history, but not, obviously, to the extent of rendering us extinct.
If, however, we act to bring the climate out of the regime for which we have this evidence (for example, by raising the CO2 level to its highest value for 800,000 years), then with our present rudimentary understanding of the climate, we cannot predict what will happen with any great confidence. And, there is evidence that climatic changes can cause tremendous damage. So, the burden of proof should be on those who say that these changes are safe.
<quote>The climate has changed throughout history, but not, obviously, to the extent of rendering us extinct.</quote>
It's come pretty close, and that's typical. Most species that have ever existed on this planet went extinct ages ago, often during periods of drastic climate change (as far as we can tell from the archeological record.)
Our own fairly recent past is the same. The latest research on the 'flood' that gave rise to flood myths in every civilization in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, suggests that the Mediterranean Sea was a fertile populated valley during the last ice age. But when the ice age ended due to natural climate change, the rising Atlantic broke through the natural dam at Gibraltar and flooded the valley, and into the Black and Red seas, up the Nile, etc. That's a massive natural disaster that must have wiped out a pretty big chunk of humanity. It was probably repeated on a smaller scale around the world too, as seaside villages were flooded out by the rising oceans and likely increase in the number of storms as the world warmed up.
I wasn't actually projecting anything, just asking for clarification on his position.
But while I'm at it, how do you know we will suffer a great deal?
I am sure the climate is changing, I can read a graph of temperatures as well as the next guy. I am sure that humans are causing it, how could we not be considering our emissions? But how are we so damn sure that this is going to be a massive catastrophy?
There are predictions of doom and gloom in agriculture - but compare agriculture in 1750 to 1850 to 1950 to today. Would the farmers of 1750 even recognize the farms we have today? Technology is an amazing thing. We're not talking about making Earth 150 degrees, we're taking a 1-10 degree increase in average temperatures. That will definitely change our weather patterns, but how do we know we will starve to death? So what if the rain patterns change, you can't imagine some solar powered desalination plants and irrigation systems that rival how we move oil in pipelines today? You can't imagine genetically engineering crops to withstand slightly higher temperature changes or wet weather?
As for rising sea levels, so some property will be destroyed. It won't come as a breached levee or a tsunami, it will be gradual over years. Some people will have to move. At the end of the day, the populated areas will get levees.
It seems to me that we already have plenty of people suffering now due to natural disasters from earthquakes to hurricanes to tornados. If we are so willing to spend billions or trillions of dollars on preventing people from being hurt by the climate, why don't we fix some of the more pressing issues. Let's build homes in Haiti, China and Iran to Japan level earthquake standards. Why don't we move everyone out of trailer homes in tornado alley? Why don't we build massive tsunami walls in the Pacific? Those natural disasters kill hundreds of thousands of people. I don't see anyone saying climate change will kill hundreds of thousands of people, but we are far more willing to put into effect a tax on our economy to prevent that but not a tax on our economy to build new homes in other countries, or even to move people in our own out of unsafe homes. Why do we care that humans caused climate change and not mother nature?
The problem is not as simple as just temperature change. There is a huge worldwide investment based around rainfall following existing patterns. Exchanging 100+million acres of grassland for 100+ million acres of dessert might seem ok if just as much tundra becomes grassland, however rebuilding existing cities in new locations quickly become trillion dollar projects. IMO, preventing climate change is less about protecting the ecosystem as it is protecting existing investments in roads, bridges, dams, houses and factory’s.
PS: Toss in even stronger and more frequent extreme weather and dumping CO2 is unlikely to end up as a good thing. At some point in the near future we are simply going to run out of oil so doing nothing does not mean we get to keep up our current approaches for all that long anyway.
I wasn't actually projecting anything, just asking for clarification on his position.
'Just because it is unnatural and you are philosophically opposed to it?' is very much a projection of what you think the grandparent's underlying message is.
But while I'm at it, how do you know we will suffer a great deal?
I don't know, I speculate that there is a high probability of such because accelerated climate change seems to increase the probability of extreme weather events, both sudden and seasonal. Tornadoes and hurricanes fall into the former category, things like droughts or extended rainy seasons fall into the latter. While I don't think current weather events should be held up as evidence of climate change, we can look at current weather events to gain an idea of the potential costs and difficulties if the probability forecasts are accurate.
I don't see anyone saying climate change will kill hundreds of thousands of people, but we are far more willing to put into effect a tax on our economy to prevent that but not a tax on our economy to build [...]
You can't be paying much attention if you don't see warnings about increased loss of life. This is a major risk over the long term, from extreme weather as described above to damaged agricultural prospects, to intensified competition for access to shrinking resources such as land or clean water. We do not know the exact outcome or the costs, but we can form reasonable estimates and weight them in accordance with the known predictive ability of our models to do a cost-benefit analysis.
It strikes me as odd that those who are most skeptical of predictions about climate change are also the most sure of themselves when making statements about the economic impact, insisting that all 'green' expenditure constitutes a tax as if there were no positive externalities to be had from energy efficiency or less polluting forms of power generation.
We need to because we are likely to unbalance the natural cycle and cause change that is more severe and more rapid than ever before. This is difficult to deal with, and dangerous to our survival.
We need to because we are aware of the detrimental effects our environmental behavior has not only on nature, but on ourselves too. (And we like preserving ourselves right?)
That doesn't actually answer my question at all. The GP said that the earth has natural temperature swings and we can't/shouldn't do anything about them. But we need (emphasis mine) to do something about unnatural temperature swings.
Why is there a distinction between temperature changes caused by man and temperature changes caused by nature? If nature were to cause the Earth to warm by the same amount as humans are going to, we would face the same detrimental impacts on the environment that you mentioned (that I don't deny will happen). But given those effects we have 3 and only 3 choices. We can die off. We can adapt to the changes. Or we can force the Earth back to the temperature it is now.
Obviously we will ignore the idea of dieing off.
But given that our response to a natural temperature increase of the same magnitude as the one caused by humans is either A) Adapt or B) Force cool the climate, why aren't these options considered when we are talking about human derived climate change?
Then really the question becomes, is it cheaper/better for us to fix the climate now? Or is it cheaper for us to adapt/change it back later?
That really become an economic question, one of net present value. To say that we need to do it now without addressing the other options is a philosophical position, one that puts keeping nature the way it is today at a higher value than anything else.
As for the cost of adaption, floods and hurricanes are the most costly disasters we face. In addition to that, moving infrastructure around on a short timescale (50 years) to deal with changing climate involves a massive, massive output of effort. In short, it is far more inefficient to move a large part of our infrastructure and deal with increasingly damaging weather than it is to clean up our emissions.
Also, what makes human generated forcings special is their outsized impact on climate: they appear to be moving the climate an much faster that than other forcings. The earth is currently in a cooling cycle, but is now heating rapidly as a result of industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Because we have such an outsized impact, we need to regulate our behavior. It would be just as terrible if a thousand new volcanos suddenly opened up and started spewing out carbon, but that's not what we're dealing with.
Force-cooling the climate by artificial means is not a trivial undertaking, in either scientific or political terms. Even though it might become necessary in response to natural variations, those tend to happen across fairly large timescales. Accelerating such changes by artificial means, as seems to be happening right now, is a bad thing not because it's artificial but because it likely increases the cost and difficulty of future mitigation, much like hitting the gas pedal on a steep downward slope would. In other words, I think it's going to be more expensive later than now - not to the point of shutting down all industry or anything like that, but to the extent of budgeting 1-2% for efficiency/mitigation.
> detrimental effects our environmental behavior has not only on nature, but on ourselves too.
Is the goal environmentalism to preserve the earth or to preserve humanity? The earth will survive perfectly well without humans, so I believe the (generally unacknowledged) goal of mainstream environmentalism to help humanity. That said, there are environmental fundamentalists who believe (with almost religious fervor) humans are "evil".
I agree. I think the mainstream environmental movement would get more traction if they reframed their position to focus on the benefits to humanity (of protecting the environment) rather than talking so much about the sacrifices humanity must endured to "save the environment."
My look on the whole matter is about sustainability. This is the only Earth we have, and we are many, many years away from even thinking about trying to colonize another planet or moon. From that, you'd think that common sense says that we should live in a way that keeps our planet habitable and doesn't increase the chance of a run-away chain reaction, ruining the place.
Then again we also know that common sense isn't very common, and there are a significant subset of people who are fine with abusing the finite resources we have at hand.
We do know that the Earth can heal itself a lot faster than we give it credit, when we give it the chance (re: ozone hole over Chile back in the late 90s from CFCs). So yes, the climate changes, and I'm pretty sure the extremes we're seeing today are influenced by human actions, but as long as we're taking steps to minimize our impact on the planet, we'll learn better to deal with the variability that naturally comes to this planet.
Many of the extinctions we see today are erasing genetic sequences that will take far more than another 4 billion years to develop again the natural way.
I suspect that the cost incurred by changes in the weather itself is irrelevant compared to these losses.
I think the original article's headline would have been less provacative if it had read "MIT measures actual ice melt and proves our models of the Earth's climate are still wrong."
And our lack of knowledge here is quite large. So large that the notion of "The real question is what should humans do about it?" is still preposterous. We can't "do something" about something when we don't understand how that something works. It won't stop us of course, barber's tried to 'balance your humors' to correct illness in Medival times, not because it was effective but it met the goal of 'doing something.' Few people have the tolerance to wait until actually understand how Earth's climate is created/changed/affected before they start acting. And like Medival barbers their actions may make things worse just as easily as they may make things better.
I suspect, that you are a 'Climate Fatalist' like I am. I accept that the climate will change and that no matter how much I wish it different, if Yellowstone erupts we're talking ice age baby right then and there. I also accept that it can change quickly without my help so I pursue ways to survive large variations in climates. I've recently been looking at Aquaponics [1] which is a mostly closed loop system for sustainably growing vegetables and protein using a simple eco-system that can be protected from gross changes in the environment. Since it will be impossible (remember I'm a fatalist :-) to get mainstream investment in climate change preparation until rapid climate shifts are upon us, I'm trying to find ways to seed survivability niches.
We can't "do something" about something when we don't understand how that something works.
Yes, we can.
We don't know what the outputs of the system will be for all inputs, but we know that the key input is greenhouse gases. We can reduce that input if we choose, and our fundamental lack of knowledge about what the outputs might be means that is almost certainly a good idea.
There is a developing literature on such fundamental uncertainty ('ambiguity') in policy problems of this sort. E.g. See here: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5454
Nice link. I think you missed my point. The climate is going to change, humans cannot at this stage of our evolution and sophistication, prevent it from changing.
We're dumping CO2 and our farm animals are dumping methane into the atmosphere. Check. And we can do lots of things which will change how much CO2 and how much methane we dump into the atmosphere. Check.
Here's the sticky bit: If we could leave the planet, en-masse right now with all our farm animals and remove ourselves from the equation completely, the climate is still going to change from what its like today to something different.
We know that to be true because there is lots of evidence that it was different before we arrived on the scene, both hotter and colder. We are beginning to see several different studies that some of those previous periods changed quite rapidly. We know those changes had zero anthropogenic contribution. Based on that argument I make my claim that whether or not we are on the planet the climate will change.
We don't know all of the factors that cause the balance in the system to become unbalanced. As this MIT observation has shown, yet again, that our current best guesses about what the balance is in that system are incorrect (but that is good science, we'll keep putting together the pieces to develop that understanding) Based on that evidence I make the claim that we don't know enough of the factors which affect how climate changes to accurately predict any outcome of any action we might make.
I am unaware of any chain of reasoning based on actual science that supports either the conclusion that humans can "control" the Earth's climate, or a conclusion that any action we might take now will stop climate change from happening.
The flawed reasoning that some people put forward is "Humans are the proximate cause of climate change if we stop doing things that affect the climate, the change will stop." However, as we are not the only cause of climate change (which is shown by the fact that the climate has changed without our help) and the fact that we do not have a model which accurately accounts for all the factors (we keep finding new things where reality and the model differ, this MIT observation is yet another example), impeaches this line of reasoning.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/arctic-ice-melt-0810.html