It’s not ‘both siderisms’ or saying there’s no problem. It is saying don’t exaggerate because it leads people astray and then to bad policy decisions. Global warming will not turn the planet into a lifeless rock. As seen upthread, the earth has almost always been warmer than it is now.
DB2
I don’t have time to address the rest of the TL:DR post but I will flag this. Nice way to change the subject, Actually it’s mundane and predictable. I was not talking about “air pollution” which has been an issue since the 1940’s and which we have addressed and continue to improve on (current political climate (no pun intended) not withstanding) In my comments on this subject I am addressing the phony baloney disingenuous stances and STHU-ism scientific crucifixion by the catastrophists. Yes. I want clean air. And Lake Erie (among others) is no longer flammable. And there have been no mass midnight suffocation deaths in Pittsburgh since 1948. All good stuff.
Oh good.
We can go back to digging dinosaurs and plankton from the ground and fighting $Trillion wars.
Good stuff.
When someone says ‘this is as bad as that’ - this is both sides are at fault!
And you didn’t answer my question on what would be the correct way to explain the issue to get buy-in and some action to avert a future ‘problem/issue/concern’ or should we just express ‘disappointment’? Sorry, channeling my inner Susan Collins!
JimA
There may not be a correct way to explain the issue and get buy-in.
Generally, people have expressed to pollsters that they’re not willing to pay very much to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, any material reduction in emissions will end up costing a lot of money. And any allocation of that cost that reflects current national wealth or historic carbon emissions will end up costing voters in Western economies an even larger awful lot of money.
Given that, most voters in the West will almost certainly be willing to accept an awful lot of warming rather than pay the price necessary to avert it.
It may be that the only way to avoid that (in theory, see below) is to either overstate the dangers of inaction (“The Earth will be a lifeless rock!”) or understate the costs of action (“Decarbonizing will actually reduce energy costs!”). If you give voters a completely forthright reckoning of the costs of decarbonizing to any given level vs. the benefits of decarbonizing to any given level and how those costs and benefits are to be allocated across the world, voters in wealthy western economies may not choose an especially robust decarbonization program.
We’re starting to see that reflected in voter attitudes towards decarbonizing, because we’ve “used up” almost all of the cheap and easy measures that don’t cost very much, but also don’t reduce emissions by anywhere close to enough. Now that voters are actually looking at what’s necessary to keep reducing emissions, they’re balking.
Western countries have disproportionately reaped the benefits of past carbon emissions, while poorer countries are at the margins disproportionately exposed to the costs. Reversing that will involve Western countries disproportionately bearing the cost of decarbonizing, while poorer countries disproportionately reap the benefits of avoided consequences. Hence folks have “soured on climate politics,” as that becomes apparent.
I was actually looking for Bob’s input as to how to approach the sales presentation?
I agree with most everything you have pointed out and hence my belief in dire consequences.
JimA
The argument goes that the West started the industrial revolution, and has emitted more total cumulative CO2 over the years. Therefore, it is really the West that is to blame for the climate situation. But that picture is rapidly changing.
Taken as a whole, Asia has emitted more total CO2 than either North America or Europe. A few graphs from Our World in Data…
The Asia line crossed North America several years ago, and Asia is also now larger than Europe. Suppose we break it down by country…
The United States still leads everyone else, but China is catching up fast. China will surpass the EU-27 in a few years. Also, in a few years, India will surpass both the UK and Germany. It is just an extrapolation, but based on the way China is rising, it should surpass the USA sometime around 2050.
At the website, you can play around with different countries and regions, and different timescales. For those who bother to look, it is becoming increasingly obvious that China and India are where the largest growth in CO2 emissions are occurring. Perhaps in a few years, it will be obvious to most people that Asia is where the real problem lies.
_ Pete
Everyone already knows this. As exhibit A, I hold up this official release from the Whitehouse from 2001:
As you know, I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India
This issue has been obvious to everyone for a long, long time. Maybe you are only just now looking into it, but this issue has been front and center of the debate for many decades.
The part that is missing in these discussions is the concept of leadership. At the time the US was the global leader in CO2 emissions. But the US abacated leadership, which gave everyone else cover to duck their responsibilities too.
So here we are a quarter of a century later still blaming China, and still not taking any responsibility for our own actions.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if an adult were in charge.
I missed that question. My basic answer would be more honesty. First, as albaby has noted, being more upfront about costs. Drop the scaremongering; let people know that it’s a multigenerational project. Honesty extends to the scientific side as well. For example, stop future projections using unrealistic warming levels such as SSP5-8.5.
Personally, I prefer spending more money on adaptation; mitigation spending should at least concentrate on the cheaper projects. The IRA, with its trillion dollar spending, is estimated to reduce temperatures by less than 0.02 degrees.
Consider a more win-win spending approach. Imperial Beach is a small city south of San Diego down near the Mexican border. It’s elevation is 20 feet, but if they are concerned about future sea level rise they could…
By the way, here’s a graph of the sea level rise at La Jolla, just up the coast. The rate is 2mm/yr
DB2
I fully agree that no one is doing anyone any favors by exaggerating the science. That said, we’ll be doing the mitigation anyway. But your example sounds like a lose-lose scenario. It is too late to change the zoning. The infrastructure has already been built. Seawalls are extremely expensive to build and maintain. Seattle recently replaced the seawall on Elliott Bay at cost pushing half a billion. That’s a lot of money for a small town. And the costs don’t go away. The Netherlands spends tens of billions each year maintaining its seawall system.
Plus seawalls cause beach erosion. Sure, it will protect the town, but will destroy the main feature of the town. Now repeat this exercise for every at-risk coastal city in the US. Now expand to the rest of the world. The costs are fantastic and the outcomes less than desirable. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll be doing it, but it isn’t good.
And what about spread of infectious tropical diseases like malaria and dengue fever? How much does that cost to manage? How do we mitigate the additional years of life lost? Or just increased heat in general. How do we account for heat-related illnesses and deaths, especially among vulnerable groups like the elderly and children?
You can keep on going down the list. The costs are reducing carbon dependence are born in just a few sectors. The costs of climate change are everywhere. Individually it might be small, like running your air conditioner for a few more days a year. But multiply that by the entire country and the costs are huge.
lol, this is not a people don’t understand problem. This is leadership is dumb problem. It will be fixed soon.
Silly. Just silly. Even Silly thinks that’s silly
Hmm. You seem have missed the OP. Here’s the NYT headline:
It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.
DB2
Here is another example of unevenly distributed costs: Wildfires. One thing the article didn’t mention is that while increased CO2 levels can increase plant growth, this also increases fuel loads.
The Los Angeles fires in January. Blazes in Canada in 2024. Hawaii burning in 2023. It seems as though every year, the planet has more huge wildfires that devastate communities. But so far, the science has been sparse on whether the most economically damaging fires really are on the rise.
Now, a new study has found that catastrophic wildfires with both high economic costs and loss of human life are, indeed, happening more often, and that those fires are strongly linked to climate change. The past decade in particular has seen a significant uptick in costly, deadly fires, according to the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s a pretty big wake-up call,” said Brian Harvey, a professor of forest fire science at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new study. “We live on a flammable planet, and that flammability is increasing.”
Gift Link
I think you overestimate the rate of change. As noted upthread, the sea level in the area is increasing at 2mm/yr which works out to 0.8 inch per decade. If the residents are concerned they could pass a zoning change this year about new construction. 50 years and four inches from now in 2075 even the newest building would be over half a century old. Not that this would be easy change to make, but it might reduce the pain down the road.
In this case the seawall would be by the sea. Imperial Beach has a beach that is some 250 feet wide. My idea would be to basically build a slightly raised bike path at the end of the beach (250’ from the ocean). It can be used recreationally as is done in other beach towns to justify most of its cost. And then, If necessary, down the road it can be upgraded.
DB2
Crux fact is that nothing in this thread or in the other “news” about GCC surprises nor contradicts what we have largely known since James Hansen’s and colleagues scientific publications and public testimonies gave cause for worry in the mid 1980’s. (Many of the oil majors knew before then, and smothered their findings in the interests of their owners.)
What we have had instead of thought or progress toward solutions are yowlings of outrage that our lust for dessert before eating our vegetables will be costly, and that Momma Earth does not give a single thorougly digested patootie about our (largely paid for by various petro-powers both corporate and national) shrieks — and an ever growing list of insanely long term destructive to our future options such as fleets of private jets and etc.. Under current USA governance hatred of thinking clearly on this subject has become a quasi-religio-politico obsession, and no surprise that those concerned about the future have sprouted their own set of enraged emotional visions and shibboleths.
The “best solution” in terms of market theory was known waaaay back in the 80’s, and utterly rejected, not because wrong but because too conceivably achievable:
However, instead of the above or something similarly long sighted and sane, albeit daunting politically, the problem of the immense power of petroleum burning in world affairs has only increased, and with it the certainty that future “humanity” will face relatively unnecessary and immense suffering and loss, cursing us for our stunning immorality.
This is not all that complicated. It is just sad and unpleasant. The denial of basic intergenerational morality is stunning.
The Pope agrees with me…. fancy that.
It’s actually insanely complicated. The costs are enormous. There is considerable disagreement over who in which countries should bear the costs. Because the allocation of costs will have to be at the international level, there are no institutions that exist that can decide the question of who should bear the costs. There is no world-wide entity with authority to decide how the costs will be allocated.
Thus, you have a collective action problem that is literally global in scope. There is no mechanism that exists to decide who has to decarbonize, who has to pay the costs of that decarbonization, and (perhaps most significantly) how to enforce those allocations once they’re made.
It is comforting to point to the power of the petroleum industry, or some other “bad guy,” and pretend that they are the reason nothing sufficient to solve the problem gets done. Because if that were true, it would at least be, indeed, a simple problem. All that would be necessary is to break their power.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The reason nothing sufficient to solve the problem gets done is because there’s no way for people to solve the problem, because the problem is global in scope and because there is no agreement on who should bear the costs.
albaby
I agree with your post. The problem is not complicated, but given human nature and civilizational complexity finding workable solutions is and will be extremely complicated.
Try talking to an intelligent 16 year old and explaining what a great job we are doing….
It’s not that hard (I’ve got a 17-year-old at home, and I’ve had this conversation):
I won’t pretend to the 16-year-old that that’s a “great job,” but there’s no real way to avoid it.
I do not understand your third bullet point. Are you claiming the heating of our planet will just stop or slow down when we get to the 1.5 degree mark?
