Browsing a Royal Society Phil Trans special issue on geo-engineering and reading a paper by Lane and Montgomery tempts me to ask: is carbon a lost cause? After twenty years of laborious efforts, the plain truth is that greenhouse gas [GHG] control proposals have so far failed to move the needle on global emissions. Even in Europe, where the social consensus for GHG reduction is supposedly strongest, emissions continue to grow. Where GHG emissions have fallen, underlying changes in economic structure may have played a bigger role than climate policy. ….
“Even if we could develop a non-warming energy tech, we would face the challenge of convincing the rest of the world to forgo the convenience of burning the oil/coal they have, using infrastructure already built for that purpose.”
Yes, but a fairly convincing argument would be if these techs are cheaper than the convenience of burning oil/coal. Google has an interesting initiative for that purpose.
Julian. So all of Greenland is down hill? Silly me. What a fool I've been. Thank you for setting me straight on that.To the various cavemen wannabes. 1. CO two increase is harmless to climate and beneficial to biomass. That has always been and evermore so shall be. There is no EVIDENCE to the contrary. 2. It is not even conclusive the assumed effects of water vapour are correct. 3. Kyoto and a partridge in a pear tree are about as relevant to climate as my last bum burp. 4. That damned Gore's hot air has pissed off Lovelock's Gaia and its now PDOing all over. Oh look at that damned AMO. Sunspots are just a fond memory of warmer days. Damn NASA sneaking behind Hansen's back and proving hot air is as relevant to rapid sea ice disappearance as idiot Branson sprout expeditions carving the ice up. Carbon dioxide poisoning the sea. At last. Everything is now known about about the deep blue. EVIDENCE? Oh that poor coral, only just got established and wham the sea that covered the land and gave it life is taking it back again. Or is it a cycle coral is well used to? Was it 30 metres down that living coral was recently discovered. That invisible friend is some kind of joker... or was it a sceptic plant? Hmm I wonder. I see double glazing company stocks are up in the warming upper climates. Must be from the increasing noise of toasted kiddies forcing sales.Even were the co2 nonsense true, C oh two is a very, very popular product, and addictive. Tried living without it? Withdrawal sets in very, very quickly. Thank gods it is free. Oh it isn't we now pay for common property. I am sometimes amazed at the intelligence portrayed by inertia. As with the inertia to do sfa about its reduction. Co2 output by humans only increases. Oo, oo, (ape talk for) Hawaii have led the world in the pretend reduction frenzy, seen their latest effort? And that despite world class smoothing effort.I hope that ostriches and sceptical lepers alike found my insane humour amusing.I would ask of some commenters if they lived in a house built of cow dung, or worse, would they turn their nose up at economic development to make activist delusion/illusionists happy??
Robin, sir, may I reproduce your fine article on my blog? I recommend you look first, you may find it unsuitable, although I hope not.I am schitzoid, blog wise. http://my.telegraph.co.uk/c... - http://my.telegraph.co.uk/c... - http://my.telegraph.co.uk/c...(but apart from this socially irritating refusal to swallow BS, personality near normal - whatever that is)
I'm thinking... you know the way floating ice doesn't count, because it's already displacing exactly its melt volume? So nobody worries about water levels from the Arctic pack-ice. But that implies: the ice doesn't have to 100% liquefy. It just has to slide off into the sea as slabs, and it will have already displaced as much as melting.
Does land get more slippery to ice as temperature goes up?
200m is wrong: melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise, and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise - not that it's going to happen any time soon:
The Greenland ice sheet has huge inertia - it will take a thousand years to melt it.The Antarctic looks even more unshiftable: ice five miles thick and temperatures 37 degrees below zero down at the pole.
Ben is substantively wrong on two of his three points to my knowledge and I have suspicions about the third.
Re ocean acidification: The buffering processes are slow. Equilibration takes centuries. The ocean will take a hit the likes of which it has possibly never seen, or has possible seen 65,000,000 years ago at the paleocene/eocene boundary.
Re: temperature of the Antarctic interior: Nobody seriously suggests melting of East Antarctica. West Antarctic ice sheet sits on the ocean bottom and may become mechanically unstable with modest temperature increases. Also Greenland may well melt; it did melt in the previous interglacial. Total sea level rise at risk is in excess of 10 meters. (Of course, if Tim Tyler gets his way we are talking about 200 meters. so check the altitude of any real estate you may own before backing him up.)
Re: barrier reef; it is entirely possible that corals are sensitive to peak temperature; hence even if the statistics of temperature are merely smoothly shifted it is entirely possible that the periods of heat stress may be greatly expanded. I don't know about this for sure but given his arguments on the other two points I'd bet this one is wrong too.
Stuart, what evidence is there for this gateway worry model?
My evidence is anecdotal and from personal experience (another way of saying "no real evidence"). But since the evidence you presented was no stronger on the issue of how people worry, I thought I'd present mine. It turns on the fact that the most sucessful way I've found of convincing people to worry about future events is to start our with global warming, and work in other issues after.
Conversely, from a few conversation where I haven't taken that approach, I've found that unconcern with future risks in general is highly corellated with unconcern about global warming in particular.
Do you think there is no limit to the number of distant future issues we can have many people consider in depth all at once?
Of course not, but we are nowhere near the saturation point.
Paglia:The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideolo
Higher carbon dioxide will cause ocean acidification. Yes, by a marginal degree (a tenth of a pH at most, we are talking about trace gases in a highly buffered system, remember). However, multiple experiments have been done with various oceanic wildlife in greenhouses at massively elevated CO2 concentrations (up to 1500 ppm), and to my knowledge, none of them have shown any adverse effects.
The great barrier reef has an annual ocean temperature variation of up to 10 degrees C along it's length. How can raising the temperature two degrees destroy the coral? That claim is ludicrous on it's face.
Indeed, comparing climate change to annual variation throws a large cloud of doubt over many claims. The Antarctic CANNOT melt due to climate change because CO2 could raise temperatures by 2-4 degrees, but the Antarctic is currently a balmy -20C.
Please, use common sense when dealing with this subject and research every severe claim on both sides, and remember that everyone wants to deceive you.
Re: If it could be shown that northern temperates would really benefit from warming, there might be the basis of a political divide here.
The biggest benefits accrue in the furthest north regions - where there are currently few people - because of the whole "icy wasteland" business.
With a bit of effort, we could turn those regions into something much more like a steamy tropical jungle - but we should not rely on political advocacy from the people who currently live there - because there are few of them. However migration is relatively easy, especially if there are tens of thousands of years in which to do it.
Re: It's hard to see anyone benefiting from a several-degree rise compressed into less than a century, however.
"Global warming is more of an opportunity than it is a challenge for the British tourism industry, if speakers at last week’s the Tourism Society debate are to be believed. According to UK-based The Tourism Society, the debate was opened “with an assault on gloom mongering, suggesting that global warming was good news all the way for British tourism” Tourism Society chairman Roger Heape.""The development of the oil industry is one of the most important components in Greenland's effort to establish a self-bearing economy," Kim Kielsen, Greenland's minister of mines and petroleum, has said. In the shorter term, the country is relying on the rapidly expanding eco-tourism market. Business is already booming in Ilulissat, where hotels are now booked up a year in advance and unemployment is 0 per cent.""The United States is predicted to be one of the tourism winners, with international tourism to the U.S. increasing an estimated 13.7 percent over what it would have been if the atmosphere wasn't warming up.""The biggest winners: Canada, which they predict will experience a 220 percent increase in international arrivals by 2100, Russia (174 percent) and Mongolia (122 percent)."
Tim, you bring up the interesting possibility that there will be serious pro-warming advocacy from some sector of world opinion. Normally it is assumed that business as usual leads to strong warming, that all the positives lie in minimizing that warming as much as possible, and that all the debate lies in how much mitigation we should be willing to strive for or to pay for. But even the IPCC (see "summary for policymakers") includes a few positives in its inventory of impacts, though the negatives definitely predominate.
In terms of the purely latitudinal zones of classical geography, the northern temperate zone has the biggest population, followed by the "torrid zone" between the tropics. If it could be shown that northern temperates would really benefit from warming, there might be the basis of a political divide here. It's hard to see anyone benefiting from a several-degree rise compressed into less than a century, however.
Re: As for whether the will exists to do all of this... the Australian experience colors my perceptions; the desire for action on climate was a big reason why the last government lost office, and that came about because of a decade-long drought.
We should not allow the more equatorial countries to overly influence global policy - simply because they get more of the costs and fewer of the benefits.
Warming will mostly affect temperatures at large lattitudes - where the effects will be positive. Those areas are often too cold - below the freezing point of water even.
Ending the ice age is one of the things that humans are doing which is obviously right. Since the configuration of the continents puts the earth at serious risk of reglaciation, we should continue - if not redouble our efforts to melt the ice caps - since they have caused so many problems for the planet in recent eras. Get the planet out of the freezer - and away from the danger zone.
Daublin, I'd first refer you to the IEA studies cited in my first link, in particular the "BLUE" scenario in "Energy Technology Perspectives 2008", which aims at a long-term target of 450 ppm while maintaining global economic growth of 3.3% per annum from now until 2050. I gather that they built a world model, consisting of coupled national economic models, with the various forms and uses of energy disaggregated, and then asked what levels of investment, carbon prices, etc., would suffice to bring about that goal. The answer was apparently not far from what would be required just to produce such growth even without concern for emission levels. (I'd like to see the study repeated with a goal of 350 ppm, which is the fashionable target if you want to have no net temperature rise at all. Let's get the quantitative bad news on just how hard that is to achieve.) I cannot vouch for the assumptions behind the models, but it is a uniquely detailed study and deserves the attention of anyone serious about the subject.
Secondly... I don't know how you feel about the potential of technology, but I am definitely in the camp which says that sufficiently advanced nanotechnology could make the whole problem trivial (whether from a geoengineering perspective or a zero-emissions perspective), and that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence could do the design work to produce that level of nanotechnology very rapidly. It is reasonable to think that such a Singularity would kill you unless you had already solved the problem of Friendly AI, so just charging ahead on basic AI/NT research is not exactly a recipe for survival. But it does suggest the size of the unexplored regions of design space, and the speed with which they might be explored.
Suppose you examined the eight sectors considered by the APPCDC, and aimed at a zero-emissions target for each sector; i.e. electricity generated without emissions, cement or a substitute produced without emissions, and so forth. You might look into new forms of rapid manufacturing, combined with Internet distribution of blueprints, as a way to roll out the technologies globally. (There was a news story last year about modifying a desktop printer so it would print out electronic circuits; I wonder if you could similarly produce photovoltaics.) Places like the UAE's zero-emissions model city, Masdar, can be a testing ground (though one also needs old-style cities, with legacy infrastructure, where rapid substitution strategies can also be tested)... Such scattered innovation is already taking place, I'm just talking about cranking it up by a few orders of magnitude. Al Gore's moonshot 2.0 project (100% renewable generation of US electricity within a decade) is one likely locus for that.
As for whether the will exists to do all of this... the Australian experience colors my perceptions; the desire for action on climate was a big reason why the last government lost office, and that came about because of a decade-long drought. I'm not sure how the EU found the will to already initiate emissions trading; perhaps the less democratic, more technocratic character of the European super-state made it easier for a new layer of green econocrats to be added to the system. Both US presidential candidates support sizeable reduction targets for 2050. Japan and Korea are also on board. China has some of the world's biggest green industries and markets, just by virtue of size and centrality. The pieces are certainly in place for a much bigger effort than has been made so far.
Re: I see no other option except to put up a fight.
The other option is to enjoy the long-overdue end of the horrifying ice age - and delight in the Earth's natural fauna and fauna finally recolonising the desolate, icy wastelands of the north.
Re: In the short run, it has mostly negative effects, because everything living is adapted to current temperatures.
The Earth contains a wide range of temperatures - the only temperature range that might vanish is at the poles - which are desolate icy wastelands.
There are a few creatures who will find their temperature range vanishes at the top of the mountain they retreat up - and other creatures won't be able to migrate fast enough to follow their temperature zone - but basically global warming will make large expanses of Russia, Canada and Greenland much more habitable for many creatures, including humans - thereby having a substantial positive impact on the Earth's carrying capacity, farming area, and suitability for life.
Mitchel, I plowed through your first response, and you describe an interesting framework for the international cooperation issues. However, that part is two steps ahead. How do you address the more basic problem that no country seems to have made truly significant reductions in CO2 emissions lately? If even Kyoto's mild demands are proving too difficult to comply with, then what basis do we have for thinking there is a humane way to live with 20% emissions?
This is a major elephant in the room for anyone wanting to adjust the climate by modifying CO2 emissions. There is no known way for a to reduce CO2 emissions to a significant degree while also being humane. Drastic population reduction would work, as would deindustrialization, but is there any way that works and is also kind to human beings?
Re: surely there will be negative effects, but how do they compare to the positive
In the long run, it may make no difference. In the short run, it has mostly negative effects, because everything living is adapted to current temperatures.
Say x_n is a vector (x1_n, x2_n, ...). Imagine a continuous high-dimensional mapping x_{n+1} = = f(x_n). You start at x_0 = (x1_0, x2_0, ...). For every i (representing a species, or a major adaptive "decision" by a species), the current point is updated with a period typical for i, ranging from hours to decades depending on the value of i, in this way:xi_{n+1} = xi_{n} - epsilon * gradient of f(x_n)[i] (steepest descent in the dimension representing i's utility).
Imagine this function has had ten thousand years of gradient search in this fashion. Your current value of x_n is represented by a steel ball rolling "downhill" in that space (although because this is a mapping from many dimensions into those same dimensions, I am misleading you a bit here, because the level of the ball is represented in only 1 dimension). Now you take the multidimensional space and give it a good shake. What are the odds the ball will end up lower than it was after 10,000 years of gradient descent? Not good.
“Even if we could develop a non-warming energy tech, we would face the challenge of convincing the rest of the world to forgo the convenience of burning the oil/coal they have, using infrastructure already built for that purpose.”
Yes, but a fairly convincing argument would be if these techs are cheaper than the convenience of burning oil/coal. Google has an interesting initiative for that purpose.
Julian. So all of Greenland is down hill? Silly me. What a fool I've been. Thank you for setting me straight on that.To the various cavemen wannabes. 1. CO two increase is harmless to climate and beneficial to biomass. That has always been and evermore so shall be. There is no EVIDENCE to the contrary. 2. It is not even conclusive the assumed effects of water vapour are correct. 3. Kyoto and a partridge in a pear tree are about as relevant to climate as my last bum burp. 4. That damned Gore's hot air has pissed off Lovelock's Gaia and its now PDOing all over. Oh look at that damned AMO. Sunspots are just a fond memory of warmer days. Damn NASA sneaking behind Hansen's back and proving hot air is as relevant to rapid sea ice disappearance as idiot Branson sprout expeditions carving the ice up. Carbon dioxide poisoning the sea. At last. Everything is now known about about the deep blue. EVIDENCE? Oh that poor coral, only just got established and wham the sea that covered the land and gave it life is taking it back again. Or is it a cycle coral is well used to? Was it 30 metres down that living coral was recently discovered. That invisible friend is some kind of joker... or was it a sceptic plant? Hmm I wonder. I see double glazing company stocks are up in the warming upper climates. Must be from the increasing noise of toasted kiddies forcing sales.Even were the co2 nonsense true, C oh two is a very, very popular product, and addictive. Tried living without it? Withdrawal sets in very, very quickly. Thank gods it is free. Oh it isn't we now pay for common property. I am sometimes amazed at the intelligence portrayed by inertia. As with the inertia to do sfa about its reduction. Co2 output by humans only increases. Oo, oo, (ape talk for) Hawaii have led the world in the pretend reduction frenzy, seen their latest effort? And that despite world class smoothing effort.I hope that ostriches and sceptical lepers alike found my insane humour amusing.I would ask of some commenters if they lived in a house built of cow dung, or worse, would they turn their nose up at economic development to make activist delusion/illusionists happy??
Robin, sir, may I reproduce your fine article on my blog? I recommend you look first, you may find it unsuitable, although I hope not.I am schitzoid, blog wise. http://my.telegraph.co.uk/c... - http://my.telegraph.co.uk/c... - http://my.telegraph.co.uk/c...(but apart from this socially irritating refusal to swallow BS, personality near normal - whatever that is)
I'm thinking... you know the way floating ice doesn't count, because it's already displacing exactly its melt volume? So nobody worries about water levels from the Arctic pack-ice. But that implies: the ice doesn't have to 100% liquefy. It just has to slide off into the sea as slabs, and it will have already displaced as much as melting.
Does land get more slippery to ice as temperature goes up?
200m is wrong: melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise, and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise - not that it's going to happen any time soon:
The Greenland ice sheet has huge inertia - it will take a thousand years to melt it.The Antarctic looks even more unshiftable: ice five miles thick and temperatures 37 degrees below zero down at the pole.
- http://timtyler.org/tundra_reclamation/
Ben is substantively wrong on two of his three points to my knowledge and I have suspicions about the third.
Re ocean acidification: The buffering processes are slow. Equilibration takes centuries. The ocean will take a hit the likes of which it has possibly never seen, or has possible seen 65,000,000 years ago at the paleocene/eocene boundary.
Re: temperature of the Antarctic interior: Nobody seriously suggests melting of East Antarctica. West Antarctic ice sheet sits on the ocean bottom and may become mechanically unstable with modest temperature increases. Also Greenland may well melt; it did melt in the previous interglacial. Total sea level rise at risk is in excess of 10 meters. (Of course, if Tim Tyler gets his way we are talking about 200 meters. so check the altitude of any real estate you may own before backing him up.)
Re: barrier reef; it is entirely possible that corals are sensitive to peak temperature; hence even if the statistics of temperature are merely smoothly shifted it is entirely possible that the periods of heat stress may be greatly expanded. I don't know about this for sure but given his arguments on the other two points I'd bet this one is wrong too.
Stuart, what evidence is there for this gateway worry model?
My evidence is anecdotal and from personal experience (another way of saying "no real evidence"). But since the evidence you presented was no stronger on the issue of how people worry, I thought I'd present mine. It turns on the fact that the most sucessful way I've found of convincing people to worry about future events is to start our with global warming, and work in other issues after.
Conversely, from a few conversation where I haven't taken that approach, I've found that unconcern with future risks in general is highly corellated with unconcern about global warming in particular.
Do you think there is no limit to the number of distant future issues we can have many people consider in depth all at once?
Of course not, but we are nowhere near the saturation point.
Weds. links
Paglia:The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideolo
I have rarely seen such bad assumptions.
Higher carbon dioxide will cause ocean acidification. Yes, by a marginal degree (a tenth of a pH at most, we are talking about trace gases in a highly buffered system, remember). However, multiple experiments have been done with various oceanic wildlife in greenhouses at massively elevated CO2 concentrations (up to 1500 ppm), and to my knowledge, none of them have shown any adverse effects.
The great barrier reef has an annual ocean temperature variation of up to 10 degrees C along it's length. How can raising the temperature two degrees destroy the coral? That claim is ludicrous on it's face.
Indeed, comparing climate change to annual variation throws a large cloud of doubt over many claims. The Antarctic CANNOT melt due to climate change because CO2 could raise temperatures by 2-4 degrees, but the Antarctic is currently a balmy -20C.
Please, use common sense when dealing with this subject and research every severe claim on both sides, and remember that everyone wants to deceive you.
Re: If it could be shown that northern temperates would really benefit from warming, there might be the basis of a political divide here.
The biggest benefits accrue in the furthest north regions - where there are currently few people - because of the whole "icy wasteland" business.
With a bit of effort, we could turn those regions into something much more like a steamy tropical jungle - but we should not rely on political advocacy from the people who currently live there - because there are few of them. However migration is relatively easy, especially if there are tens of thousands of years in which to do it.
Re: It's hard to see anyone benefiting from a several-degree rise compressed into less than a century, however.
"Global warming is more of an opportunity than it is a challenge for the British tourism industry, if speakers at last week’s the Tourism Society debate are to be believed. According to UK-based The Tourism Society, the debate was opened “with an assault on gloom mongering, suggesting that global warming was good news all the way for British tourism” Tourism Society chairman Roger Heape.""The development of the oil industry is one of the most important components in Greenland's effort to establish a self-bearing economy," Kim Kielsen, Greenland's minister of mines and petroleum, has said. In the shorter term, the country is relying on the rapidly expanding eco-tourism market. Business is already booming in Ilulissat, where hotels are now booked up a year in advance and unemployment is 0 per cent.""The United States is predicted to be one of the tourism winners, with international tourism to the U.S. increasing an estimated 13.7 percent over what it would have been if the atmosphere wasn't warming up.""The biggest winners: Canada, which they predict will experience a 220 percent increase in international arrivals by 2100, Russia (174 percent) and Mongolia (122 percent)."
Tim, you bring up the interesting possibility that there will be serious pro-warming advocacy from some sector of world opinion. Normally it is assumed that business as usual leads to strong warming, that all the positives lie in minimizing that warming as much as possible, and that all the debate lies in how much mitigation we should be willing to strive for or to pay for. But even the IPCC (see "summary for policymakers") includes a few positives in its inventory of impacts, though the negatives definitely predominate.
In terms of the purely latitudinal zones of classical geography, the northern temperate zone has the biggest population, followed by the "torrid zone" between the tropics. If it could be shown that northern temperates would really benefit from warming, there might be the basis of a political divide here. It's hard to see anyone benefiting from a several-degree rise compressed into less than a century, however.
Re: As for whether the will exists to do all of this... the Australian experience colors my perceptions; the desire for action on climate was a big reason why the last government lost office, and that came about because of a decade-long drought.
We should not allow the more equatorial countries to overly influence global policy - simply because they get more of the costs and fewer of the benefits.
Warming will mostly affect temperatures at large lattitudes - where the effects will be positive. Those areas are often too cold - below the freezing point of water even.
Ending the ice age is one of the things that humans are doing which is obviously right. Since the configuration of the continents puts the earth at serious risk of reglaciation, we should continue - if not redouble our efforts to melt the ice caps - since they have caused so many problems for the planet in recent eras. Get the planet out of the freezer - and away from the danger zone.
Daublin, I'd first refer you to the IEA studies cited in my first link, in particular the "BLUE" scenario in "Energy Technology Perspectives 2008", which aims at a long-term target of 450 ppm while maintaining global economic growth of 3.3% per annum from now until 2050. I gather that they built a world model, consisting of coupled national economic models, with the various forms and uses of energy disaggregated, and then asked what levels of investment, carbon prices, etc., would suffice to bring about that goal. The answer was apparently not far from what would be required just to produce such growth even without concern for emission levels. (I'd like to see the study repeated with a goal of 350 ppm, which is the fashionable target if you want to have no net temperature rise at all. Let's get the quantitative bad news on just how hard that is to achieve.) I cannot vouch for the assumptions behind the models, but it is a uniquely detailed study and deserves the attention of anyone serious about the subject.
Secondly... I don't know how you feel about the potential of technology, but I am definitely in the camp which says that sufficiently advanced nanotechnology could make the whole problem trivial (whether from a geoengineering perspective or a zero-emissions perspective), and that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence could do the design work to produce that level of nanotechnology very rapidly. It is reasonable to think that such a Singularity would kill you unless you had already solved the problem of Friendly AI, so just charging ahead on basic AI/NT research is not exactly a recipe for survival. But it does suggest the size of the unexplored regions of design space, and the speed with which they might be explored.
Suppose you examined the eight sectors considered by the APPCDC, and aimed at a zero-emissions target for each sector; i.e. electricity generated without emissions, cement or a substitute produced without emissions, and so forth. You might look into new forms of rapid manufacturing, combined with Internet distribution of blueprints, as a way to roll out the technologies globally. (There was a news story last year about modifying a desktop printer so it would print out electronic circuits; I wonder if you could similarly produce photovoltaics.) Places like the UAE's zero-emissions model city, Masdar, can be a testing ground (though one also needs old-style cities, with legacy infrastructure, where rapid substitution strategies can also be tested)... Such scattered innovation is already taking place, I'm just talking about cranking it up by a few orders of magnitude. Al Gore's moonshot 2.0 project (100% renewable generation of US electricity within a decade) is one likely locus for that.
As for whether the will exists to do all of this... the Australian experience colors my perceptions; the desire for action on climate was a big reason why the last government lost office, and that came about because of a decade-long drought. I'm not sure how the EU found the will to already initiate emissions trading; perhaps the less democratic, more technocratic character of the European super-state made it easier for a new layer of green econocrats to be added to the system. Both US presidential candidates support sizeable reduction targets for 2050. Japan and Korea are also on board. China has some of the world's biggest green industries and markets, just by virtue of size and centrality. The pieces are certainly in place for a much bigger effort than has been made so far.
Re: I see no other option except to put up a fight.
The other option is to enjoy the long-overdue end of the horrifying ice age - and delight in the Earth's natural fauna and fauna finally recolonising the desolate, icy wastelands of the north.
Re: In the short run, it has mostly negative effects, because everything living is adapted to current temperatures.
The Earth contains a wide range of temperatures - the only temperature range that might vanish is at the poles - which are desolate icy wastelands.
There are a few creatures who will find their temperature range vanishes at the top of the mountain they retreat up - and other creatures won't be able to migrate fast enough to follow their temperature zone - but basically global warming will make large expanses of Russia, Canada and Greenland much more habitable for many creatures, including humans - thereby having a substantial positive impact on the Earth's carrying capacity, farming area, and suitability for life.
Mitchel, I plowed through your first response, and you describe an interesting framework for the international cooperation issues. However, that part is two steps ahead. How do you address the more basic problem that no country seems to have made truly significant reductions in CO2 emissions lately? If even Kyoto's mild demands are proving too difficult to comply with, then what basis do we have for thinking there is a humane way to live with 20% emissions?
This is a major elephant in the room for anyone wanting to adjust the climate by modifying CO2 emissions. There is no known way for a to reduce CO2 emissions to a significant degree while also being humane. Drastic population reduction would work, as would deindustrialization, but is there any way that works and is also kind to human beings?
Re: surely there will be negative effects, but how do they compare to the positive
In the long run, it may make no difference. In the short run, it has mostly negative effects, because everything living is adapted to current temperatures.
Say x_n is a vector (x1_n, x2_n, ...). Imagine a continuous high-dimensional mapping x_{n+1} = = f(x_n). You start at x_0 = (x1_0, x2_0, ...). For every i (representing a species, or a major adaptive "decision" by a species), the current point is updated with a period typical for i, ranging from hours to decades depending on the value of i, in this way:xi_{n+1} = xi_{n} - epsilon * gradient of f(x_n)[i] (steepest descent in the dimension representing i's utility).
Imagine this function has had ten thousand years of gradient search in this fashion. Your current value of x_n is represented by a steel ball rolling "downhill" in that space (although because this is a mapping from many dimensions into those same dimensions, I am misleading you a bit here, because the level of the ball is represented in only 1 dimension). Now you take the multidimensional space and give it a good shake. What are the odds the ball will end up lower than it was after 10,000 years of gradient descent? Not good.