I understand the emotion. Large scale climate change has generally also meant large scale extinction events. And in the past when the threat of world wide nuclear war had us looking into the face of human extinction it was very scary. At least with nuclear war we could choose not to engage, not to participate. Climate change is different though, its not like we've ever actually been able to control the weather, much less the climate. That makes it that much scarier. Before you can reason about climate change you have to accept that for reasons completely outside of your (or anyone's) control the climate will change. Human's historically aren't good at this as evidenced by their throwing virgin girls into volcanoes to get the volcano to stop erupting, or sacrificing people or animals to bring the rains back and end a drought. Don't underestimate how hard it is to get to that acceptance.
Now, to cover your points.
1) (Implied) Humans are affecting the climate.
Of course they are, so are sheep, so are whales, so are trees. Its a relatively closed system and the activity of all the internal pieces have an effect.
2) Humans can't direct the change of the climate
That is a true statement, there are theories about various geo-engineering things we are capable of doing to change the climate, but our best models disagree about the effect of those changes. We can detonate all our nuclear bombs and put megatons of aerosols into the atmosphere, we can try to jump start various ecosystems, we can try to change the proportion of various chemicals in the atmosphere. The bottom line is we don't know what those changes are bringing or what other strategies will bring.
3) The climate will change, regardless of Humans
This too is an accurate statement. When Yellowstone next erupts, the climate will change for centuries. I don't think there are any lines of research or reasoning that suggest that wouldn't be the case. All of our models predict that you put that much stuff in the upper atmosphere and it will change things down here.
4. (Implied) Negative affects that Humans behavior has on the climate is irrelevant.[sic]
This gets to the heart of the emotional crisis. Human behavior affects the climate, it enables change. Given the amount of leverage green house gases have in the models, it seems to enable a lot more change than we originally suspected. It is quite sensible and rational to work out how to minimize that forcing function. But the climate will still change, because Humans aren't the only agent pushing on the climate.
The emotion comes from the realization that no matter what you do, you can't stop this 'bad thing.' And that is really scary, especially when people put it inside what might be considered your 'time horizon' (the next 50 to 100 years [which is in itself bogus because we're still working out the models])
To use an illustrative example which is outside our time horizon, the Andromeda Galaxy is going to collide with the Milky Way[1]. It will, in all likely hood, result in the complete destruction of our solar system. There is nothing we can do about it. Except its going to happen in about three to four billion years. So nobody cares.
5. Invest in Human survival
So if you can accept that we don't know what we don't know about the way climate changes or might be changed. Then the best investment of your time is to work on things you do know how to do. There are lots of things that serve both purposes, you can work on battery technology that would make using electricity easier (fewer pounds of CO2 per joule than gasoline for example) or colonizing the moon (nobody on the moon is going to be directly changing the Earth's climate), urban planning at higher elevations, housing and moving populations above a rising sea level and at a reducing sea level. After all if we start another ice age all that seawater will be trapped in ice again.
I think a responsible species would be ready for any change, while developing a deeper understanding of how change occurs. So if you're not already in a research program studying the climate, your next best choice would be getting us ready for a change.
Your reputation precedes you, so I'm a bit hesitant here... but I have some questions based on this comment.
Point 1: do you think humans are effecting the climate as much as whales or sheep? Less, more? If so, what order of magnitude, and what is the primary cause of the difference? (EDIT: also, do you accept the notion of the climate as a closed systems as excluding geologically sequestered reservoirs of hydrocarbons like oil and coal, or not?)
Point 2: If you accept as a given that man-made CO2 production is causing climate change, would reducing CO2 emissions be an equally valid strategy that geo-engineering?
Point 3: I don't believe anyone is disputing this.
Point 4 and point 5: If the human species is creating a preventable crisis, would it be wiser to _not_ cause that crisis and devote the same resources to solving a less avoidable one instead? (like say, an eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera like you mentioned)
ps - You say that the collision of Andromeda and the Milk Way will destroy our solar system, but from the referenced article, "The merger poses no real danger of destroying Earth or our solar system, researchers said"
Your reputation precedes you, so I'm a bit hesitant here
Hopefully the reputation is not for flaming and invective, I'm a rational guy and seek out contrary points of view to understand them.
1) Humans are a huge energy transformer on the planet, so by definition, they have a big influence. One can argue that by raising sheep (flatulence jokes aside, a source of methane) and killing whales, you can link us to pretty much a lot of change. My original point is that the world is a closed system, our existence as the dominant species on the planet ensures our place at the top of the influencer pile of all other species.
The primary cause for the disparity of our impact is that we use energy to amplify our existence. We use gas to move our cars, we use electricity to power our appliances and light our buildings and homes etc etc. To achieve 'neutral' impact with the rest of the species we would have to live a feral existence without fire. (Long way of agreeing that our species has more impact than other species)
I don't quite get what you were driving to with the sequestration question. I tend to think of the world, at a gross level, as a thermodynamic system. Heat goes in from a variety of sources and heat goes out through other systems. Current climate models highlight the reduction of heat loss through the atmosphere as a factor in raising the mean surface temperatures. This is also the primary argument in the IPCC work for the case of anthropogenic contribution to global temperatures. I find the argument credible.
"If you accept as a given that man-made CO2 production is causing climate change, would reducing CO2 emissions be an equally valid strategy that geo-engineering?"
I think its more nuanced than that. I think of "climate" as the name of the emergent property of 'weather' which occurs as a result of the interaction between a lot of variables in a very complex system. The planets climate is thus the measurable combined effect of all these variables. In all of the models, the effect of CO2 concentrations is perhaps the greatest single factor on the overall climate.
That said, how the climate "should" behave (which is to say predicted to behave) at various concentrations, has not been all that great. Models say Greenland should have less ice than it does, or more, or temperatures should go up by X but instead they go up by Y or not at all. And all that says is that the climate is a complex system that we don't completely understand it.
And because don't understand it well we can't really say what will happen if we pull a few peta-tons of CO2 out of the air, or cover millions of acres (hectares) of land with solar cells, or replant millions of acres of trees, or remove them. Every push on the system causes it to respond, and that response can affect future pushes. That is what makes systems like this so amazing difficult to study. Very hard to isolate variables.
So with that in mind, my answer is that I believe that changing CO2 levels in any direction will push on the thermodynamic balance of the earth. What I don't have an answer for, and I have yet to see a credible argument for, is a solid statement how those changes will manifest, either way. At the extremes? Sure, but plus or minus 10%? Not so much.
And if you're thinking "But if we went back to pre-1900 levels of CO2 in the atmosphere wouldn't we reverse the change?" I'm going to disagree with that, a hundred years of higher CO2 and the system has adapted, take it all away all at once, and you don't know what adaptations will be wrenched away, even slowly we don't know. Consider the following.
There is evidence that bird migration is happening earlier as a result of higher average temperatures. This has happened over the course of decades, possibly centuries. As the migrations change other parts of the system also change, and the birds change as well. Now we figure out we can 'fix' CO2, pull it all out of the air and in under a decade CO2 levels drop and temperatures go back to what they were a century ago. Now the current generation of birds is screwed, they make their migration at the wrong time and freeze/starve to death. Not enough generations to evolve a new timing.
Clearly it's speculative but I am trying to illustrate that it has never been true that there is some lever that humans have their hand on where they could just 'dial in' the climate.
"If the human species is creating a preventable crisis"
I think this is a good way to frame the different ways of thinking about this.
One is "preventable crisis" where climate change is like pollution or small pox, we just make a few policies and regulations and put our minds to fixing it.
I think this is a comfortable way to think about climate change because it contextualizes it in human terms of past victories.
The other is "ignoring a preventable crisis" where climate change is like an earthquake or a hurricane.
This is the less comfortable way (but I think more rational) way of thinking about climate change. There are things we can do to lessen our risk (generate less CO2 for example on climate, not build on earthquake faults for earthquakes) but we approach it from the perspective of living with a changing system, and maximizing our quality of life in the presence of those changes.
p.s. If you want to be pedantic, it is hard to predict the local effects on our solar system from the impending collision with Andromeda, a more predictable 'bad' event is that the Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen and Earth will not survive its 'Red Giant' phase, but again, outside the timeline that humans perceive as a threat.
Hah - I only meant your reputation as a prolific and highly rated commenter.
As for my response... you seem to have made a few presumptions about what I believe. Your comments about "all at once" restoring a pre-1900s atmospheric level, or humans ever having been able to "dial in" a climate aren't reflective of what I feel, fwiw. As the question you asked, I mentioned the closed system/sequestered carbon because I don't think it's valid to include carbon that has been removed from the atmosphere (CACO3, coal deposits, etc) when talking about a normal climate cycle.
I don't entirely understand the differences in the framing at the end, either. If you believe we need to reduce CO2 emissions, then we're in agreement.
And regarding the postscript - I didn't mean to be pedantic, nor am I an expert in the subject. I was just pointing out the discrepancy, and I probably didn't have to, so my apologies there.
Point 2: I am thinking Chuck's point is not that we shouldn't try to reduce CO2 emissions, but rather that we shouldn't try to combat warming through other avenues. We are not very good at the latter, and it introduces additional complexities such as "where exactly should the climate be, anyway?". Your initial statement left it up to interpretation whether you meant you wanted to combat CO2 emissions, or secure the proverbial interstellar ice cube to drop in our oceans.
Point 4: I'm not sure if there is anything we can do about Yellowstone, unless our hydroponics have advanced enough to allow us to live and farm underground and we establish tremendous power capacity to make up for the lack of sunlight.
do you accept the notion of the climate as a closed systems as excluding geologically sequestered reservoirs of hydrocarbons like oil and coal, or not?
Is this even a point of contention? Sequestered hydrocarbons like oil and coal are almost entirely from plant life, which means that carbon is from the air. (90%+ of plant mass is from the air) I don't see how you could consider those deposits of hydrocarbons to be separate from the earth's climate, at least from a macro perspective.
Now, to cover your points.
1) (Implied) Humans are affecting the climate.
Of course they are, so are sheep, so are whales, so are trees. Its a relatively closed system and the activity of all the internal pieces have an effect.
2) Humans can't direct the change of the climate
That is a true statement, there are theories about various geo-engineering things we are capable of doing to change the climate, but our best models disagree about the effect of those changes. We can detonate all our nuclear bombs and put megatons of aerosols into the atmosphere, we can try to jump start various ecosystems, we can try to change the proportion of various chemicals in the atmosphere. The bottom line is we don't know what those changes are bringing or what other strategies will bring.
3) The climate will change, regardless of Humans
This too is an accurate statement. When Yellowstone next erupts, the climate will change for centuries. I don't think there are any lines of research or reasoning that suggest that wouldn't be the case. All of our models predict that you put that much stuff in the upper atmosphere and it will change things down here.
4. (Implied) Negative affects that Humans behavior has on the climate is irrelevant.[sic]
This gets to the heart of the emotional crisis. Human behavior affects the climate, it enables change. Given the amount of leverage green house gases have in the models, it seems to enable a lot more change than we originally suspected. It is quite sensible and rational to work out how to minimize that forcing function. But the climate will still change, because Humans aren't the only agent pushing on the climate.
The emotion comes from the realization that no matter what you do, you can't stop this 'bad thing.' And that is really scary, especially when people put it inside what might be considered your 'time horizon' (the next 50 to 100 years [which is in itself bogus because we're still working out the models])
To use an illustrative example which is outside our time horizon, the Andromeda Galaxy is going to collide with the Milky Way[1]. It will, in all likely hood, result in the complete destruction of our solar system. There is nothing we can do about it. Except its going to happen in about three to four billion years. So nobody cares.
5. Invest in Human survival
So if you can accept that we don't know what we don't know about the way climate changes or might be changed. Then the best investment of your time is to work on things you do know how to do. There are lots of things that serve both purposes, you can work on battery technology that would make using electricity easier (fewer pounds of CO2 per joule than gasoline for example) or colonizing the moon (nobody on the moon is going to be directly changing the Earth's climate), urban planning at higher elevations, housing and moving populations above a rising sea level and at a reducing sea level. After all if we start another ice age all that seawater will be trapped in ice again.
I think a responsible species would be ready for any change, while developing a deeper understanding of how change occurs. So if you're not already in a research program studying the climate, your next best choice would be getting us ready for a change.
[1] http://news.discovery.com/space/galaxies/milky-way-andromeda...