Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Before I start, I’d like to remind readers that as a guest poster, the opinions I voice here are not those of Anthony Watts, and should not be taken as having been endorsed by Watts Up With That.
I am going to propose an idea based on my position as a Lukewarmer regarding climate change. I fully expect to get a lot of criticism from commenters here, and I welcome it. My idea is new (at least to me), and if it is a good idea it will be sharpened by your criticism–and of course, if it is rubbish, best to know quickly, right?
I think the debate on climate change needs some new ideas and criticism too. So blast away–but please bring your A game. I neither need nor want to see the equivalent of ‘you suck, dude.’
Families, businesses and yes, even governments, need to make plans for the future. Those plans used to include assumptions about the physical environment, although most of those assumptions were passive acceptance of the status quo. However, it is now difficult to make assumptions because various theories of climate change and its effects have people wondering if their homes will be threatened by sea level rise, drought, hurricanes or floods.
Because of the competing number of possible futures (the IPCC has many scenarios and many more have been pulled from the science fiction rack and offered up to us), people are somewhat paralyzed by too many choices. I think it is time to recognize that all of use engaged in the debate about climate change are not doing the rest of the world any favors. We are making their life more difficult because they cannot make plans with any confidence.
If there is one dataset that I trust regarding the Earth’s climate, it is the measurement of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. It has been freely available for examination, it is replicated by measurements in more than one site, and in my mind survived criticism from people such as the late Ernst Beck. I trust the numbers.
The numbers show that concentrations of CO2 were 315 ppm in 1958, when Mauna Loa started measuring. Concentrations now are 390 ppm. That is a rise of 19%. The central question in climate change is, ‘What is the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to a doubling of the concentrations of CO2?’ Is the atmosphere easily influenced by CO2, producing more water vapor and adding to temperature rise, or is the atmosphere largely indifferent? Despite protestations from both sides, the honest answer is we don’t know now, and we are not likely to know for another 30 years.
Temperatures appear to have risen globally, although the accuracy of the data is not yet fully determined. The rise since 1958 appears to be about 0.5 degrees Celsius.
If these were the only statistics available to us, we would quickly conclude that the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to all human-related activities might well be 2.5 degrees Celsius. This would lead to the supposition that, if concentrations of CO2 rise to about 600 ppm, which certainly seems possible, that the Earth’s temperature will rise about another 2 degrees C. Since it’s based on measurement of temperatures, it can be presumed to include all the effects we are having on temperatures, not just CO2.
And I am arguing, no–proposing, that we do exactly that. Attempts to refine models and measurements have been unsuccessful and have served to heighten suspicion and muddy the debate. I have seen very credible arguments for sensitivities that are both higher and lower, but these arguments are based on data or models that have much higher levels of uncertainty associated with them, ranging from differing ways of measuring tropospheric temperatures to analysis of varves from Finnish lakes.
I don’t see undisputed data that will allow us to do better than the 40 years of good data we have now. So I think we should provide a ‘rough and ready’ estimate of 2 degrees C climate change this century to the public, business and politicians, so they can start making plans for the future.
It should obviously come with an asterisk and error bars, and should be presented as ‘crude, but the best we can really do at this time.’ Much like earlier and simpler climate models have often done better in handling projections of future climate, our rougher and cruder metrics may serve us better for now.
We need to stop throwing sci-fi fantasies out as plausible outcomes. We need to provide a range of outcomes based on measurements that we trust.
We also need not to be distracted by elements of the debate that have only served a political purpose. Current temperatures are not unprecedented. There was a MWP and a LIA. Sea level is rising at 3 mm per year. The ice caps are not going to disappear this millenium.
None of that really matters. Temperatures are rising, and more quickly than they have often in the past. (Yes, they have risen this quickly on occasion.) It is the speed of change and the numbers of people those changes will affect that are actually of more concern than the total temperature rise. The people in developing countries are actually more vulnerable than the last time there was a big quick rise–hunter gatherers didn’t have homes and could just move out of harm’s way, and they were few enough in number that they would not have been labeled ‘climate refugees.’
So, I call for all those involved in the climate debate to throw down their weapons, embrace this practical solution as being of use to the rest of the world, climb aboard the Peace Train and sing Kumbaya. Right.
No, have a look at this–tell me if it’s remotely possible that the skeptic community could sacrifice its current temporary, but very real advantage in the debate and agree that a rough metric that acknowledges warming but puts sane boundaries on it would be of use to the rest of the world.
Again, I’d like to thank readers who have made it this far for listening to a different side of the debate in a forum where you are more comfortable seeing the failings of your opponents exposed. If you find the gaping flaw in my logic, my idea can die quickly, if not quietly. If you see merit in my proposal, any indication of such would be warmly welcomed.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“If you find the gaping flaw in my logic, my idea can die quickly, if not quietly. If you see merit in my proposal, any indication of such would be warmly welcomed. ”
I don’t have time to read all of the comments, but I would say: Just what in the hell is your proposal? Your basic problem seems to be that you are a liberal that is stuck with some real-world realities that you cannot shake!
A rise from 315 to 390 is not 19%. It’s a rise of 24%. A change from 390 to 315 is a drop of 19%, which is probably where this error comes from.
This from a WUWT lurker, and forgive me for not reading all comments. Hopefully this ground has not been well covered.
The fundamental premise of Thomas’ thesis is valid. The earth’s temperature seems to be rising and, if so, it may have a significant impact on various communities. The challenge for all of those concerned with GW is in the “Why.” Why is the temperature rising? And is there anything that can be done to address this issue? The climate debate has turned entirely political. We cannot cede a point to the opposition for fear of being bludgeoned with it. I am a skeptic, but even I must admit that things seem to be getting warmer. As quickly as we point to the 1880 to 1940 warm-up to disprove the effect of CO2 on climate for 1960 to 2000, we concede the point that the earth has warmed 1 degree in the past century. Setting aside Dalton Minimums and Ocean Oscillations and Urban Heat Sinks and the like, Glacier’s are shrinking, Arctic ice has not fully recovered and we appear to be warmer now than in the past.
So, what do we do? That is the real question. AWG fails as an approach largely because it disregards all of the other forcing factors, thus requiring Draconian solutions (i.e., we caused this, so only we can fix it). Instead, we should promote those energy policies which lead to a decrease in the burning of fossil fuels; not because it will save the earth (we don’t actually know if it will), but because it is just good policy. The fact that it may be better for the earth is a added bonus. We should watch carefully for early signs that AWG is, in fact, real; and we should continue to study the issue of GW (albeit, not at the lucrative level that has propelled every scientist who has ever broken a sweat to become a climate expert).
Finally, we are either at a tipping point or we are not. If we are, then the world is woefully unprepared to resolve this issue. If we are not, we have some time. We should use it well.
Given this purely hypothetical scenario, what should we do…?
Tom Gray (October 20, 2010 at 3:25 pm) gave a very succinct and entirely reasonable answer:
“Can we then agree that the consequences of such a change is normal, tolerable and is neither controllable or assured?”
Bob
Dear Thomas Fuller,
The skeptical community now has a “very real advantage in the debate” (your words). And you want us to “throw down our weapons”! Unbelievable!
And the reason you want us to give up is because,
“it is now difficult to make assumptions because various theories of climate change and its effects have people wondering if their homes will be threatened by sea level rise, drought, hurricanes or floods.”
It’s the warmistas and the luke-warmistas that have been scaring the general public with science-fiction scenarios of climate catastrophe! Certainly not the skeptics. We skeptics don’t believe there is anything out of the ordinary or unprecedented happening with the global climate.
You don’t seem to have anything to offer our side, only tired rhetoric about the dangers of CO2. You come to the bargaining table without any scientific collateral.
Why don’t you come over to our side and we’ll re-evaluate the situation in 30 years.
“Good solar hot water systems are available right now”
And those will work in Bemidji in January? What part of the country are you in? How much daylight do you have in the middle of winter and what is the sun angle? What about Canada? Will it work there?
The problem with your scenario is that you assume that 100% of the temperature seen over the last 40 years was caused by CO2. There is ample evidence that some portion of that increase was caused by contamination of the temperature sensing network both UHI and microsite contamination.
A more active sun warms the earth both directly (as everyone agrees) from a slightly brighter sun, and (more controversial) indirectly by affecting cosmic rays which in turn affect cloud formation.
We do not fully understand how various oceanic oscillations affect climate. Now that we know that there are oscillations that take 50/60 years or more to fully cycle, a mere 40 years worth of data is of little value.
Finally, as others have pointed out, the Earth has been warming at a rate of around 1C every century since we came out of the Little Ice Age. Why do you assume that this warming stopped 40 years ago and CO2 took over?
Thomas,
A hypothetical: you and I are in a room that has just one (locked) door, for which we have not yet found the key. Behind it, we’ve heard there is a powerful beast that may soon break it down and have at us.
I say: “There may or may not be a beast; I have my doubts, because I haven’t heard it making a noise, and the guy who told us about it has been known to stretch the truth.”
You say: “Nah. Let’s compromise. Let’s agree there is a beast, but it’s only a smallish and young one that we could probably deal with.”
You and I are on different planets. I don’t know, and know I don’t know; and you don’t know but are apparently convinced you do.
No way on God’s earth am I going to accept your proposed compromise. Not because I’m inherently opposed to compromise; it has its place in certain circumstances. No: it’s because I’m inherently opposed to self-deception.
Tom,
Since we will never know all of the causes of climate change I can certainly see the need to make some assumptions to arrive at predictions in order to plan for the future. However, in order to come up with the 2.5 C number, you must make the assumption that all causes of climate change are going to cause a steady increase in temperature.
While I agree that CO2 will likely continue to steadily rise in the future, and this will contribute a steady increase in temperature to the overall temperature change, we don’t know that all other causes of climate change will act in the same way. If the 0.5 C temp rise was primarily due to CO2 then this wouldn’t matter, but we don’t know the magnitude of the impact of CO2 therefore we don’t know how much of the 0.5 C is due to CO2 rise.
For example, say only 0.1 C of the 0.5 C rise is attributable to CO2, and 0.4C is due to other causes, and the other causes are cyclical in nature and happen to have been going up for the past 50 year. If these other causes then enter their down cycle soon, then it is quite possible that the temperature in 100 year from now could be 2.0 C lower than it is now rather than 2.0 C higher even though CO2 continues to rise and continues to put upward pressure on temperature.
Your argument rests on the idea that all the causes of climate change over the past 50 behave the same way as CO2 and we don’t know this to be true, so your argument isn’t valid.
John
In response to Mr. Fuller at 12:44pm. You state that the 2C rise is due to all causes. However, of all known causes, the only one that is guarenteed to continue rising is CO2. Ocean cycles are already maxed out and are entering a cool phase.
The sun reached the highest level of activity in nearly a millenia during the last half of the 20th century, and is now quieting down rapidly. The rate of urbanization is slowing down as the rate of population growth slows.
So unless you are willing to postulate that everything that was increasing over the last 40 years, will continue to increase into the future, you 2C number is still meaningless.
sharper00 says:
October 20, 2010 at 4:33 pm
I like the way a case for rising temperatures is being made along with a call for real workable solutions suitable for a range of different outcomes and confidence levels is being made. I also like the way “skepticism” of the underlying facts is used to avoid having to have any actual solutions to anything and instead a position of “but the warming records have all PROVEN to be false and feedbacks have all PROVEN to be negative (because someone said they are) and anyway the real risk is another ice age”.
The reason I like it is this post and the reaction to it is a perfect microcosm of the real policy debate. Anytime an attempt is made to even discuss possibilities it’s immediately overwhelmed with a thousand contradictory reasons why the problem doesn’t exist at all. “The warming records are false!”/
And this thread in general shows why alarmists are laughed at by sceptics like me. You mentioned that none of us mentioned options for policy makers, but I did play devil’s advocate and assuming we know the Earth is warming (ignoring the CO2 part..) what can we do?
I answered this question in about post 9 I think it was? Several others talked about this as well directly, and many more although it was from the perspective we change nothing, and we tell the policy makers that we do nothing because we do not know enough. But the point remains this was discussed, you just did not read into what was being said enough.
I would like to see more posts about playing devil’s advocate like I did, because I think that was what Tom was after in the first place, but I do think there is room to also discuss CO2 + man’s effects. If mitigation is to even be mentioned, the uncertainty must be told to the policy makers. We just are not sure. This is why any mitigation techniques used (this has been mentioned by a lot of people here on this post as well) should be framed in their economic cost versus actual benefit. So basically, use common sense…
Speaking of the population of underdeveloped countries. CO2 is plant food. Plants grow bigger, faster, and with less water when the CO2 concentrations go up. Underdeveloped countries have a much higher percentage of their GDP coming from the agricultural sector.
Enhanced CO2, even if it does cause the temperature to go up by 2C (and it won’t) is still a net benefit for them.
I consider the global warming debate a matter of politics versus science. There is no legitimate science showing that any human-caused greenhouse warming would be enough to cause anything but a slightly more fertile world. The work of modelers unconstrained by the scientific method is worse than useless. Politically motivated scientists are a disgrace to their profession. Science needs a Canon of Ethics and all budding scientists must be taught the ethics and morals of their chosen profession as well as having a required course in the scientific method.
However, there is a way out of this mess, namely, adaptation. If we focus our efforts and our money on improving the lives of those in the 3rd world we could along the way adapt to any ‘natural’ climatic changes as they come.
Thanks, Tom, for your post, especially as I was one of those asking for something like this. I am starting to admire your abilities as a troll farmer. As someone said above, it’s hard to beat Vaclav Klaus’ post as a reply to yours. I will, however, venture the following:
– Correlation is not causation.
– Nothing that you mention is unprecedented (CO2 levels, global temperatures, rate of global temperature increase in the 4th quarter of the 2oth century).
– No one has shown that warming is bad. On the contrary, the record shows that civilisations have flourished in warmer times than the present, and suffered in cooler times.
– Your economic and social arguments appear to be self-defeating. You appear to accept that the main problem of the 3rd world is poverty. On the other hand, you do not appear to see that the solution is wealth in the form of cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy.
All the best.
Just my thoughts.
I don’t think that the weather stations of the past nor of current time are reliable enough to create a world wide average temperature. At the same time, I don’t believe an average worldwide temperature over the course of a year is even a worthwhile point of comparison to measure worldwide temperature. The methods used in the past to create the average guesstimates on temperatures are suspect at best, from bucket temperatures to various treemometers.
The stations of today suffer from nasty microsite biases leading to errors far greater than the delta that some scientists claim exists. We are talking about .5 centigrade change when many of these sites may have localized biases that cause them to be off by 1-5 degrees. This is of course before the seemingly random homogonization that takes the very few well operating sites and alters their numbers to reflect the majority, poorly sited weather stations. So while you feel that CO2 numbers are reliable, I certainly don’t feel that the temperature averages put out by the big 3 are worth the couple hours a month that they put into quality control. According to Gavin Schmidt, GISS only puts as much as 1/4 of a man-year annually into their temperature series quality control. http://climateaudit.org/2008/11/12/gavin-schmidt-the-processing-algorithm-worked-fine/
Having said all that, other folks have pointed out that temperature and CO2 don’t always follow one another. The fact that there are readily available cases in the past where CO2 went one way and the temperature record went the other should have made this theory disolve fairly quickly. Regardless though, the argument relies on CO2 mixing evenly and I am not fully convinced that it does. Our knowledge of historical CO2 is limited primarily to ground measurements without any historical high altitude measurements without extrapolation. Using cores of ice/dirt for historical data also suffers from a number of issues. http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/IceCoreSprg97.pdf
Before we can even really begin, we need to figure out if the items that we are measuring are useful. Good chemists experiment with clean equipment, we should expect the same from “scientists” in other professions.
re: author.
Seems you want to basically give the climatists and their religion 100% of what they want.
1) You want to say temperature changes are wholly caused by man from 1958 (why that particular year? Why not 1938 or 1941?) until today, and give it a pretty steep .5 degrees.
2) You then want to extend that out to the 600ppm as a linear progression, as if there has been any point in earths history where the progression of change was linear and not chaotic for such a long period of time.
3) You want to state that current warming of .6 degrees per century is exceptional and out of the ordinary for earths climate when even the alarmists post alteration smoothed past climate shows there were two previous warming’s which were nearly identical in the 1930s and the 1980s.
4) You want the scientists who have facts, evidence and honesty to lay down their rightful position that catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is bogus and sing cumbaya with the warmists so that the socialistic tendencies of people like you can be fulfilled by reaching into everyone elses pockets but your own to right some scientifically proven false wrong? Are you serious?
Here is my proposal.
I want all the alarmist warmongers to quit their jobs voluntarily, and if they do, we will not imprison them for the blatant and obviously fraudulent wrongs they perpetrated on humanity. This list will include not only scientists, but every last reporter who dutifully spread the propagandist lies for their ideological allies. Otherwise, I will continue to pressure my representatives to continue working towards criminal investigations, trials and imprisonment for the lot of you. You want compromise, that is my compromise.
Tom,
You answered my question above with a question, I answered yours, and you still haven’t answered mine. So let me pose the question in a different way.
The last several years have been consumed with fighting the faux “scientific consensus” that the left was using to implement purely leftist policies. Having apparently won that battle (admittedly with the help of some liberal skeptics and lukewarmers), why in the hell would conservatives now adopt a new faux “compromise consensus?”
Conservative climate skeptics are about to see a sea change in the next election. There is no sign of Barack Obama (who I know you like) gaining any sense of humility that would let him do a Clintonesque triangulation, adopting some conservative positions just to survive. So as of right now, it looks like the next election will be an unmitigated disaster for the left and, if Obama stays his course, the 2012 election should be even worse (for liberals).
I can see why liberal lukewarmers would like a compromise with conservative skeptics under these circumstances. But what earthly benefit is there for the conservatives to give up anything?
The policy disputes between liberals and conservatives generally are just as large and intractable as those between skeptics and CAGWers. Many of them are in fact the same disputes.
It isn’t the title of the liberal (alarmist, lukewarmer, skeptic) that bothers conservatives, it is their liberalism. If you want to propose policies that conservatives would support, you don’t need a “compromise consensus.” And if you want to propose liberal policies, there is no reason for conservatives to compromise.
That being said, why do you propose any compromise at all? People don’t agree on the science (see above), hence the “no consensus” dispute. What is your real goal? What policy(ies) do you want to implement that you think you can convince conservatives to enact, if only they agree on 2 degrees warming?
thomasfuller writes:
“I do not at all consider it unscientific to take the best two measurements we have–CO2 concentrations and satellite measurements of temperature–and say with appropriate caveats that if trends continue we might see 2 degrees C of warming over the next century. ”
That you do not consider such an action to be unscientific only proves how little understanding you have of anything dealing with science.
Ira, so basically you are arguing that if oil starts to run out it will get expensive, and this will be bad. So to keep oil from getting expensive in the future, we will make it expensive now.
Thomas, I see that you are still trying to square that circle.
First you point out that warming from all causes has increased the earth’s temperature by 0.5C. During this same period, CO2 has increased by 20%.
Therfore you conclude that if CO2 were to increase 100% (5 * 20%) that temperatures will go up 2.5C (5 * 0.5C).
Either you are assuming that all other causes in the first part are trivial, or you are assuming that all other causes will increase in lock step with CO2 increases.
If you can’t see the error in that logic for yourself, there is no hope for you.
I think Tom’s estimate of 2.5 C per doubling is rather crude but at least is somewhat objective. He seems to be aware that the sensitivity is logarithmic in CO2 (for some reason this one result from climate science is widely accepted) but chooses to go with a linear approximation instead, probably because he can’t remember how to work a logarithm and doesn’t know anybody who can. But at least he starts from an independent start date (Mauna Loa) and, perhaps coincidentally, arrives at a reasonable number. When he proposed this exercise at Collide-a-Scape, I didn’t know where he would take it. Tom’s proposal that we all act as if 2.5 C were really the sensitivity seemed to me it would not get much traction around here, where sensitivities of 0.5 or so seem to be in competition with “no evidence whatsoever of any impact of CO2”.
I think it could be an interesting exercise for people who have convinced themselves that S = 0.5 or S = 0 to try to decide how to behave in an S = 2.5 world. Was that what Tom had in mind?
No, Tom wants to go with a prediction of 2 C. The above, though crude, is only half the ground rules. He also wants us to presume that the final CO2 concentration WILL BE 600 ppmv. (He doesn’t specify whether this is CO2 or CO2 equivalent. There’s some handwaving about “all causes” as if they operate in lock step.) That is, there are no decisions to be made at all. 600 ppmv will happen of its own accord, thereby automagically keeping the world just at the edge of the danger zone. Then he wants to talk about how we are going to adapt.
While the exercise may still have merit, it completely avoids the hard part. It simply assumes that we will not go past the 2 C limits. It doesn’t explain how or why.
That is, it completely misses the central fact that emission scenarios are a choice, not a prediction. Will we stay below 600 ppmv, especially given the new sources of natural gas from shale and petroleum from tar sands? Fuller pulls this number out of a hat. But this number is the whole crux of the issue.
Tom says “If these were the only statistics available to us, we would quickly conclude that the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to all human-related activities might well be 2.5 degrees Celsius. This would lead to the supposition that, if concentrations of CO2 rise to about 600 ppm, which certainly seems possible, that the Earth’s temperature will rise about another 2 degrees C.” Then the 2.5 goes away and we are talking specifically about the number chosen last year as the boundary of the danger zone, 2 C, treated as a given, rather than as a goal.
This leaves little to talk about on the policy side until you get pretty far into the details of regional prognostics and regional impacts, stuff that doesn;t have much of a constituency here. This might provide for a basis of some calm consideration elsewhere, but around here people haven’t been worked up enough to pull together their, um, ideas on adaptation to a threat they don’t believe in.
I am very interested to see this crowd grapple with the question of what should be done if the sensitivity is actually around 2.5 C / doubling, as well as address how certain they are that it is much smaller. But what they would do with a 2 C perturbation is something we shouldn’t expect much response on.
Hence the rejection of the question. It has produced an interesting summary of the perceived structure of the very-low-sensitivity alternative universe though. This will prove useful in the future as residents of that reality react to the fact that the climate system did not get the memo that climate disruption has been “defeated”.
“Can’t we stop running in circles and get to an agreed upon exit strategy from fossil fuels?”
That assumes that getting off of fossil fuels is a good idea in the first place. I see no reason why such an assumption should be made.
Can I refer to the following link on Steven Goddard’s blog:
Sea Level Trends Nearly Constant For The Past 100 Years | Real Science
If the earth were warming there would have to be an evident acceleration in the rate of sea level rise due to thermal expansion of the ocean and increase in ice sheet/glacier melt. On Steven’s data there has been no visible acceleration from 1900 to date. As he says, in the face of these figures the global warming story just doesn’t fly.
In that light the suggestion of accepting a notional temperature increase, just to save further argument, is simply a suggestion that we should accept the precautionary principle no matter what it may cost. I’m not in favour.
GaryM, I’ll start with your question. I have reasons why I think conservatives should adopt a position that recognizes the strong possibility of some future warming–it is based on the reality of experienced warming since the end of the Little Ice Age. Whatever the cause, should it continue at just its present pace we will be dealing with thorny issues about flood plains, storm surge and some shifting of precipitation patterns. None of which will be particularly problematic for us, but for those in developing countries it may feel quite a bit worse. I don’t think for one second that Katrina was caused or even influenced by global warming. But I think the issues involved in the decisions about rebuilding New Orleans afterwards are emblematic of what I think we need to be aware of. And I, unlike many of my fellow Democrats, do not believe conservatives are less responsible when it comes to this type of thing.
Tobis, your rambling as usual conflates where it does not confuse, but thanks for your lustre-lacking support, such as it is. I find it difficult to understand how you can take my statement that “600 ppm is certainly feasible” and turn it into the pronouncement that “the final concentration WILL be 600 ppm.”
I was certainly pleased when I did the simple math correlating CO2 concentrations from 1958-present with temperature rise and came up with an answer similar to what I had written before was my best guess. But perhaps you don’t recall that it became my best guess in large part because in my interview with the late Stephen Schneider he said we might get by with 2 degrees C of warming this century, if we were lucky.
This whole discussion is about the policy side, Tobis, in case you haven’t noticed. I think we owe it to the people of the world to give them an idea of how much warming they can expect, so they can plan their buildings, businesses, roads and lives. They matter. They don’t care how much of it is due to CO2 or how much is rebound from a LIA due to forcings we don’t understand. They don’t. They probably shouldn’t.
We have temperature rises that we can almost trust from 1958 that show a trend of about 2 degrees for this century if things go on. Our increasing emissions (and concomitant concentrations) of greenhouse gases means to me that one of the few new factors in the equation is not going to change dramatically over the next few decades, so with 50 years’ decent data, if we tell people that our best guess is 2 degrees this century plus or minus x percent, we are doing two very good things. First, we are giving them the best information we actually have. Second, we are not throwing a ton of crappy data and science fiction scenarios to scare them into supporting General Electric’s bid to become Ecomagination Masters of the Galaxy.
Jason S. says:
October 20, 2010 at 7:35 pm
It’s not that simple. It’s a good idea to not be dependent on foreign oil. That gives you bargaining power. It’s an awful idea to deplete your own reserves when someone’s willing to sell you their reserves at an equal or lower price. Buy all of it they’re willing to sell and conserve your domestic supply against the day when the foreign supplier is no longer willing or able to sell at an attractive price.