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A Bag of Milk posted:What are the libertarian solutions to global climate change though? Even cap and trade is a rigid government enforced regulatory framework, and completely inadequate for the state of the problem we're dealing with. Most of the arguments against it basically boiled down to "yeah but let's just do cap and trade, it's already in place" but cap and trade has been a massive flop even among the countries that bought in. You can also get people who are skeptical about warming itself on board because as a revenue neutral Pigovian tax it has benefits independent of emissions reduction.
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May 22, 2014 01:51
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ToxicSlurpee posted:We're a resilient land mammal sure but we can only endure so much. There are a poo poo load of things that kill us very dead and if the planet shifts outside of our tolerance and we live nowhere but here we're hosed. The problem with global warming and pollution and what have you is that it has the potential to change the planet into one that we can't survive on. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 02:49 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 02:46
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Strudel Man posted:No, it really doesn't. There is no credible climate-change scenario that results in the planet being uninhabitable to humans, and you just sound insane when you start talking about things like this. The worst-case scenario (unlikely as it may be) is civilization collapse, not extinction. Yeah, if we keep up what we're doing now. Our population is still increasing and I guarantee you we can figure out worse ways to damage our surroundings.
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May 22, 2014 02:47
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Yeah, if we keep up what we're doing now. Our population is still increasing and I guarantee you we can figure out worse ways to damage our surroundings.
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May 22, 2014 02:51
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The problem with global warming and pollution and what have you is that it has the potential to change the planet into one that we can't survive on. Was there ever actually a time this side of the Paleozoic where humans could not possibly have survived? As long as there is at least some flora/fauna that has some nutritional value to us and isn't outright poisonous it seems you should be able to sustain at least a very small population of humans with hunting and gathering. After all, humans were able to expand outside their original habitat and across the globe long before evolution would have any say in the process. The quality of life and the populations supported in those habitats varied greatly, but it seems there are very very few places where no humans have ever lived. I understand that even during the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event there were was still plenty of edible biomass to go around, even if species diversity took a huge hit. Human hunters could in theory have managed to live off dinosaurs or shrews alike, as long as it was something.
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May 22, 2014 02:53
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If I recall one time a supervolcano erupted and the human population was reduced to around 10,000 but we hosed our way back up to the top. Edit: Found it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory ToxicSlurpee posted:Yeah, if we keep up what we're doing now. Our population is still increasing and I guarantee you we can figure out worse ways to damage our surroundings. World population is actually projected to level out and begin to shrink by 2060 if current trends continue. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-great-contraction-experts-predict-global-population-will-plateau-a-795479.html Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 03:13 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 02:57
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Strudel Man posted:With all due respect, your 'guarantee' carries absolutely no weight. Baseless apocalyptic rambling only distracts from the dangers that actually exist. The question isn't "can we come up with worse ideas" the question is "will we use them?" Look at human history; we can always come up with something worse. Many of those things we looked at and said "yeah that's a bad idea, let's never use it or never use it again." Mr. Wynand posted:Was there ever actually a time this side of the Paleozoic where humans could not possibly have survived? As long as there is at least some flora/fauna that has some nutritional value to us and isn't outright poisonous it seems you should be able to sustain at least a very small population of humans with hunting and gathering. After all, humans were able to expand outside their original habitat and across the globe long before evolution would have any say in the process. The quality of life and the populations supported in those habitats varied greatly, but it seems there are very very few places where no humans have ever lived. I understand that even during the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event there were was still plenty of edible biomass to go around, even if species diversity took a huge hit. Human hunters could in theory have managed to live off dinosaurs or shrews alike, as long as it was something. One of the biggest threats to human survival would be social regression and civilization collapse, actually. Our best bet, from a survival standpoint, is to establish ourselves in more places than just Earth. If civilization and technology still exist then we'll be organized enough to survive even catastrophic things like supervolcanoes and giant meteor impacts. If we regress back to a hunter-gatherer stage where we number in the thousands a massive catastrophe could utterly destroy us. Right now, as a race, we have an opportunity to ensure our survival. That opportunity will not last forever.
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May 22, 2014 03:11
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What exactly is "civilization collapse?" A regression to a prior level of economic development such as feudalism, or the complete collapse of all human institutions into a Hobbesian state of nature?
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May 22, 2014 03:16
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Fojar38 posted:What exactly is "civilization collapse?" A regression to a prior level of economic development such as feudalism, or the complete collapse of all human institutions into a Hobbesian state of nature?
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May 22, 2014 03:21
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Strudel Man posted:Well, we could hypothesize about either, I suppose. The former seems slightly more credible, but that's not saying very much. The problem is that human progress is driven by technology and culture, neither of which are likely to be forgotten even if there was a very sudden catastrophe like a meteor impact or supervolcanic eruption. For something that happens as slowly as climate change, with flashpoints happening often years and continents apart, it strikes me as basically impossible for civilization to collapse from that.
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May 22, 2014 03:23
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Fojar38 posted:The problem is that human progress is driven by technology and culture, neither of which are likely to be forgotten even if there was a very sudden catastrophe like a meteor impact or supervolcanic eruption. For something that happens as slowly as climate change, with flashpoints happening often years and continents apart, it strikes me as basically impossible for civilization to collapse from that. I wouldn't be so sure about that. If enough people die that no-one alive can remember how to build, say, combustion engines, or computers, we likely wouldn't recover that knowledge for a long time. We have a vague idea of how they work, but if most of all that knowledge was lost we'd be hosed for a very long time. There was a TED talk of some kind where some guy tried to build a toaster from scratch, and it was about as successful as you would imagine (not very). Edit: to be fair, combustion engines would be easier to re-invent than computers. Most people get the general principle behind an engine, but as far as they know computers run on magic smoke.
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May 22, 2014 03:34
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Elotana posted:An internationally harmonized fee-and-dividend carbon tax is as libertarian as it gets, I think. Most of the academic right (e.g., Mankiw, Laffer, DeLong, Cowen, Becker, etc.) doesn't have an issue with it until you get out to the Austrian fever swamps and it's also got some fans among some of the more alarmist scientists (Hansen) who see it as more transparent, simpler to implement, and less prone to special-interest gaming than cap-and-trade. Most carbon taxes are laughably low right now but it's just a matter of goosing it up to the right level. $200/ton would be a good starting point, and you could easily make a carbon tax harmonization treaty "progressive" by, say, deriving the tax level mathematically from a formula based on emissions per capita. Thanks, this was informative. But even these right wing academics are far outside of the American right wing mainstream thought. I can't see a pigovian tax on carbon emissions making it through Congress for the foreseeable future. These are the guys that, when Duke Energy spilled a bunch of coal ash into rivers, said that we shouldn't punish Duke for a mistake and that we need to end the EPA's reign of terror. It's not that we're stuck on square one - we're not even within sight of square one.
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May 22, 2014 03:43
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The other issue is that things like computers, kitchen appliances, and cars require a poo poo load of infrastructure in place and resources that come from multiple places. Fancy poo poo like that is absolutely not easy to build and part of the reason we can right now is centuries of development of the infrastructure, which requires a lot of organization to maintain. This takes the effort and expertise of a wide variety of people. Like that toaster example, there are people out there who are experts on toaster making. Part of the reason we can have people that specialize in making toasters is because we're organized and advanced enough to support the toaster maker. Same thing applies to everything else, but good luck using anything modern if the race regresses enough that nobody can generate electricity anymore. Power generation is in and of itself a difficult, complex thing to do on any sort of large scale.
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May 22, 2014 03:51
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A Bag of Milk posted:Thanks, this was informative. But even these right wing academics are far outside of the American right wing mainstream thought. I can't see a pigovian tax on carbon emissions making it through Congress for the foreseeable future. These are the guys that, when Duke Energy spilled a bunch of coal ash into rivers, said that we shouldn't punish Duke for a mistake and that we need to end the EPA's reign of terror. It's not that we're stuck on square one - we're not even within sight of square one. Elotana fucked around with this message at 04:38 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 04:35
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Strudel Man posted:No, it really doesn't. There is no credible climate-change scenario that results in the planet being uninhabitable to humans. The worst-case scenario (unlikely as it may be) is civilization collapse, not extinction. Are you just going to keep repeating this ad naseum? Is it possible for humans to go extinct? What types of events might bring about this in your eyes?
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May 22, 2014 05:15
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Elotana posted:An internationally harmonized fee-and-dividend carbon tax is as libertarian as it gets, I think. Most of the academic right (e.g., Mankiw, Laffer, DeLong, Cowen, Becker, etc.) doesn't have an issue with it until you get out to the Austrian fever swamps and it's also got some fans among some of the more alarmist scientists (Hansen) who see it as more transparent, simpler to implement, and less prone to special-interest gaming than cap-and-trade. Most carbon taxes are laughably low right now but it's just a matter of goosing it up to the right level. $200/ton would be a good starting point, and you could easily make a carbon tax harmonization treaty "progressive" by, say, deriving the tax level mathematically from a formula based on emissions per capita. Implementing a carbon tax is completely ineffective if it's going to be repealed soon after, as in Australia. 
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May 22, 2014 06:12
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down with slavery posted:Are you just going to keep repeating this ad naseum? But yes, I am going to keep repeating ad nauseam that the human race isn't going to be wiped out as long as people keep baselessly asserting it. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 06:46 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 06:43
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Strudel Man posted:But yes, I am going to keep repeating ad nauseam that the human race isn't going to be wiped out as long as people keep baselessly asserting it. Humans as we know them will eventually vanish from the universe. Either we'll become something different or die off within a few million years.
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May 22, 2014 07:05
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Humans as we know them will eventually vanish from the universe. Either we'll become something different or die off within a few million years.
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May 22, 2014 07:23
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Negative Entropy posted:True, but that has nothing to do with climate change at all. It does because enough climate change would change Earth into a planet we could not survive on, as we are. It might not happen for a few hundred years but the possibility is very real.
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May 22, 2014 07:35
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If we get a repeat of the Permian die-off (as in the ocean warms so much that the currents stop) I imagine we'd be not far behind. Yet another reason to read about shrinking ice sheets with some concern.
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May 22, 2014 07:37
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Strudel Man posted:Planetary-level events. Asteroid impacts, gamma-ray bursts. Maybe large-scale thermonuclear war, though that one's iffy. Basically, it would have to be something that makes small-scale agriculture impossible everywhere on earth, which is a rather exacting criteria. Agriculture is far from necessary for human survival. We've only farmed for, what, the last 5% of our existence? Anyway, it should be obvious from recent history that it isn't necessary to render the planet completely uninhabitable for a species to drive it to extinction. Especially for species like us, large mammals with a long gestation period, it only requires sustained downward population pressure. We wiped out much of the planet's extant megafauna by taking slightly too many over centuries. Climate change is a planetary-level event. Even after the K-Pg impact it probably took thousands of years for the dinosaurs to actually go extinct. In a much warmer world humans will be able to survive short term, reproduce, maybe continue farming, have basic civilisation and so on. That short term survival doesn't matter, if it's bad enough to overcome our (relatively) slow reproductive rate, we'll eventually go extinct, since the impacts we're causing now could well persist for millennia. I'm not saying it's at all likely, I personally think we'll either finally get our act together or collapse too early to reach that point, but it's not impossible. Also, all this is fairly academic, we have far more important things to worry about, such as trying to prevent the developing world suffering horrifically in the short term.
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May 22, 2014 07:47
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I hate to put it like this, but which parts of the world will be positively affected, i.e. where should one consider moving to? Basically, Canada/UK and Ireland/Central Europe (floods notwithstanding)/Scandinavia, right? Longer growing seasons, higher crop yields, milder winters? What about the US?
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May 22, 2014 08:16
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Climate change will open up northern Canada for greater economic exploitation and the arctic might become a very popular trade route. The UK's climate will get milder and they'll be able to grow crops in Britain that they couldn't before. I'm not sure about the US.
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May 22, 2014 08:25
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Canada's soil is for the most part a pretty thin layer on top of rock, it is not very good farming even if you warm it up. I still have a heck of a hard time picturing humanity's extinction even with something like the P-Tr event, again just going by the fact that pre-technological humans have demonstrated an ability to live in places that are about as nasty and devoid of life as you might expect even among the worst-case scenarios. I think we would be able to work around even very major changes in ecology (though at great cost, no doubt). If the atmosphere becomes unbreathable or sunlight can't reach the surface or radiation reaches lethal levels - those are the kinds of changes where extinction becomes a reasonably plausible outcome.
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May 22, 2014 08:39
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Strudel Man posted:Planetary-level events. Climate Change is a planetary-level event.
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May 22, 2014 12:07
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The New Black posted:Agriculture is far from necessary for human survival. We've only farmed for, what, the last 5% of our existence? It is pretty necessary for civilisation though, and I'd kind of like it if we could keep that because it theoretically means I don't have to work my butt off 24/7 just to stay alive.
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May 22, 2014 12:36
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Mr. Wynand posted:Canada's soil is for the most part a pretty thin layer on top of rock, it is not very good farming even if you warm it up. You're thinking of the Canadian Shield, I guess? Out west is not so bad, although I wonder if permafrost turns into good soil when it melts.
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May 22, 2014 13:03
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In Siberia (where we see this actually happening), we see that the thawing of permafrost soil can be really lovely: With just the top thawed and the ground beneath frozen, the newly freed soil is drowning in water that cannot escape to the ground beneath. The result: fens that are hard to traverse, have very poor soil, and are the perfect home for methane-producing bacteria. And if the fens get dried out by unexpected heat, they burn like hell:  (Siberian wildfires. During April, 40,000 square miles of Siberia were on fire). So thawing is... not really a good thing, even if you ignore the release of methane from the thawing itself. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 13:44 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 13:39
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Renaissance Robot posted:It is pretty necessary for civilisation though, and I'd kind of like it if we could keep that because it theoretically means I don't have to work my butt off 24/7 just to stay alive. Well if that's all you're concerned about, you can go ahead and relax because by most accounts hunting & gathering is actually less work intensive than early agriculture. You just have to worry about disease, killing off competing bands and population control "the hard way" (there are strict upper limits to how large hunting & gathering bands can be, which were only undone by agriculture). And no internet. Kafka Esq. posted:You're thinking of the Canadian Shield, I guess? Out west is not so bad, although I wonder if permafrost turns into good soil when it melts. I thought it was all shield until you hit the rockies? There is decent land left outside of that but it's a very thin strip that makes up a tiny percentage of our land mass. My point was Canada will never become the world's breadbasket - we'd be extremely lucky if we could support our own population with the farm land we have, permafrost or not. If all those current prime arable lands like the midwest and its equivalents around the world go away they are not likely to pop up anywhere else - it will just be gone for good and mass famine is absolutely going to become a very immediate issue.
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May 22, 2014 16:43
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The shield disappears underground somewhere in Manitoba, and Saskatchewan and Alberta can be fertile, since they get a little more sun than other places in Canada, for whatever reason, and they have deep soil.
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May 22, 2014 17:25
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Kafka Esq. posted:The shield disappears underground somewhere in Manitoba, and Saskatchewan and Alberta can be fertile, since they get a little more sun than other places in Canada, for whatever reason, and they have deep soil. Aren't we ruining Alberta via tar sands extraction? Or is that impact relatively confined?
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May 22, 2014 17:42
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The actual sands are a minuscule portion of the land though their overall environmental impact is hard to know at this point (as there are people whose job is literally to ensure it stays hard to know). My own guess though is that local farming is going to be far less affected than overall global ecology.
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May 22, 2014 18:06
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TehSaurus posted:Aren't we ruining Alberta via tar sands extraction? Or is that impact relatively confined?
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May 22, 2014 18:08
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Public interest in Climate Change peaked in 2006.quote:Despite overwhelming scientific consensus concerning anthropogenic climate change, many in the non-expert public perceive climate change as debated and contentious. There is concern that two recent high-profile media events—the hacking of the University of East Anglia emails and the Himalayan glacier melt rate presented in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—may have altered public opinion of climate change. While survey data is valuable for tracking public perception and opinion over time, including in response to climate-related media events, emerging methods that facilitate rapid assessment of spatial and temporal patterns in public interest and opinion could be exceptionally valuable for understanding and responding to these events' effects. We use a novel, freely-available dataset of worldwide web search term volumes to assess temporal patterns of interest in climate change over the past ten years, with a particular focus on looking at indicators of climate change skepticism around the high-profile media events. We find that both around the world and in the US, the public searches for the issue as 'global warming,' rather than 'climate change,' and that search volumes have been declining since a 2007 peak. We observe high, but transient spikes of search terms indicating skepticism around the two media events, but find no evidence of effects lasting more than a few months. Our results indicate that while such media events are visible in the short-term, they have little effect on salience of skeptical climate search terms on longer time-scales.
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May 22, 2014 22:23
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If I've ever heard a conservative talk about the Himalayan glacier melt rate, it's only in the context of "this is the latest talking point circulating around the skeptic blogs this week." On the other hand, I literally cannot have a conversation about global warming without HOCKEY STICK and CLIMATEGATE being brought up. The search term analysis severely underestimates its persistence in the public mind. People aren't searching for it because they all know (or think they know) what it is and what it means. That doesn't mean they aren't talking about it. Re-branding it as "climate change" was a pointless juke, though. It underestimates the mendacity of the skeptics and the memory of the public. "Global warming" is accurate regardless of what happens in individual regions over short time periods, and re-branding hasn't made people give more of a poo poo when it's cold outside. Elotana fucked around with this message at 22:40 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 22:37
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Strudel Man posted:No, it really doesn't. There is no credible climate-change scenario that results in the planet being uninhabitable to humans. The worst-case scenario (unlikely as it may be) is civilization collapse, not extinction. On what basis do you reject the theory that most mass extinctions on earth were caused by poison farting oceans? I'm no scientist, but Peter Ward et al have done a thorough job of convincing me; I'd love to hear why he's wrong and climate change will just mean Greenland will be the next Hawaii.
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May 22, 2014 23:01
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Elotana posted:An internationally harmonized fee-and-dividend carbon tax is as libertarian as it gets, I think. Most of the academic right (e.g., Mankiw, Laffer, DeLong, Cowen, Becker, etc.) doesn't have an issue with it until you get out to the Austrian fever swamps and it's also got some fans among some of the more alarmist scientists (Hansen) who see it as more transparent, simpler to implement, and less prone to special-interest gaming than cap-and-trade. Most carbon taxes are laughably low right now but it's just a matter of goosing it up to the right level. $200/ton would be a good starting point, and you could easily make a carbon tax harmonization treaty "progressive" by, say, deriving the tax level mathematically from a formula based on emissions per capita. Libertarians don't really listen to the academic right, and neither do politicians. Less special-interesting gaming makes carbon taxes less attractive to the typical right wing politican, see the Australian Liberals dropping a carbon-tax for "Direct Action" (handing out government contracts)
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May 22, 2014 23:43
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Fojar38 posted:What exactly is "civilization collapse?" A regression to a prior level of economic development such as feudalism, or the complete collapse of all human institutions into a Hobbesian state of nature? I define it as no access to air-conditioning.
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May 23, 2014 05:28
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Slarlid posted:On what basis do you reject the theory that most mass extinctions on earth were caused by poison farting oceans? I'm no scientist, but Peter Ward et al have done a thorough job of convincing me; I'd love to hear why he's wrong and climate change will just mean Greenland will be the next Hawaii. The big thing that makes me think it isn't particularly relevant to today, though, is that the Permian/Triassic era was really loving hot. Like, seawater temperatures peaking around 40C, about 10 degrees above modern maxima. Ocean anoxic events are temperature-dependent, since higher temperatures reduce oxygen solubility in water. So If IPCC estimates were significantly underestimating the degree of warming that we're going to get, then maybe hydrogen sulfide-producing bacteria would be something to worry about. I guess that's probably the the kind of assumption that went into his 2175 scenario. But it doesn't seem especially likely, particularly when we're still waiting for temperatures to catch back up to the models. edit: drat, that link doesn't work. I got a working one from google, and tried to trim it to the good bit. Here's the raw one: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...eypsm8TD8nVOprg Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 08:46 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 08:35
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