Over eons incredible natural climate changes have occurred, so how can we know for sure that humans are causing the changes happening now?
Why is the demand for absolute certainty one-sided? Why are actions to prevent damage subjected to demands of certainty but actions causing risk of damage are not subjected to a demand that they prove to a certainty they will not cause damage, or even prove to a certainty they will end up yielding a net positive benefit? If the rule is that any action cannot occur until we have certainty on its justification and consequences, then what does that mean for the action of producing another drop of oil? In other words, if all action to protect against climate change must be blocked because we don't have certainty on the implications, isn't the corollary that all oil production must be blocked until we have certainty on the implications of that?
Isn't the only time we will know for sure a time when it will be too late to do anything to stop it? Isn't demanding that we not decide or act until we have absolute certainty a round-about way of demanding that we not act at all? Isn't this a standard gimmick used increasingly often by those who want to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions? But actually everybody _is_ making decisions and taking actions every day of their lives.
If it's ok to risk disrupting the life processes on which our health and security depend to the point that the survival of many species is jeopardized, why is it not ok to risk disrupting economic processes to the point that survival of many corporations is jeopardized? Isn't this comparison preposterously lop-sided, since a species can take a million years to replace while a corporation can be replaced in months?
Any allocation of resources to one purpose means not allocating them to another purpose, thus losing the opportunity of what could have been gained with the alternative. Economists call this the "opportunity cost". Why are the opportunity costs of investing in CO2 remediation trumpeted loudly but the opportunity costs of deepening our dependence on fossil fuels and failing to invest in alternatives not addressed?
When there is an imbalance in supply and demand, why is it that the only choices presented are between which options to increase supply, and no choices for reducing demand are considered? Why are efficiency-increasing technologies and demand reduction never allowed to compete fairly with jacking up supply, even on a free market basis? Could it be because they are typically more cost-effective and lots of supply options would fail to stand up to the competition?
Since when does absolute proof really have anything to do with this issue? Do climate skeptics demand proof that their house is guaranteed to catch fire and burn to the ground before buying fire insurance or agreeing to pay for the operation of the local fire department? Is waiting till the flames are visible before shopping for a contractor to install a sprinkler system or flame-retardant roof a sensible or responsible plan? If it's prudent to spend money, without proof anything bad will happen, to protect a private home, of which there are millions in existence to fall back on if one is lost, why is it not sensible to take steps, including ones that cost money, to insure the integrity of our earthly home, of which there is only one in existence and no other to fall back on?
A study in 1996 concluded that between loss of snowpack and rising sea levels causing collapse of the Bay Delta, California could lose 65% of its fresh water supply, and there would be 70% more fire. But nobody knows for sure whether this would have been 100% caused by the actions of people so therefore we should not do anything about it, right?
When playing russian roulette you never know for sure whether you will get a bullet, so does it follow we should keep pulling the trigger?
Warming reduces the ability of plants to inhale carbon dioxide. Beyond a critical point, plants actually exhale more carbon dioxide than oxygen, contributing to global warming. Isn't it safe to say we won't know for sure whether this will result in a catastrophic positive feedback loop unless we try it?
The hotter and drier things get the more fires will burn, which contribute to CO2 and global warming. But why should we worry about future vicious circles and interactions when it's so much more fun to endlessly debate the arcane aspects of interpreting historical data and making linear extrapolations?
There are many other nonlinear dynamics. For years scientists have been warning they have been finding increasing evidence of abrupt climate changes in the past. Many natural systems have mechanisms for maintaining homeostasis under a variety of pressures, but isn't it self-evident that no system has infinite capacity, but if pushed too hard it breaks down and flips to a different regime?
One good explanation used the analogy of a canoe. You can keep leaning and pushing more and more on one side of a canoe and very little happens. But then one tiny additional push and the next thing you know you're under water and the canoe has found a new equilibrium in an upside down position. But won't there always be those who right up to the moment of the last push pompously proclaim that all of the data to date proves that all of our pushing has had no significant effect, therefore people concerned about serious trouble are just over-emotional scare-mongering chicken-littles?
Even if it turned out that large parts of the US coasts were submerged and a shrunken population was reduced to scratching for grasshoppers in a desertified landscape, wouldn't there be somebody shaking his finger saying there's no PROOF this was caused by the actions of people?
When certainty is required before incurring a dollar cost but certainty is not required before doing things that are liable to incur costs in terms of health or life itself, what does that say about which things we do and do not value?
When the proposal is putting a man on the moon, with no predictable benefit to anybody, cost is no object and the starry-eyed belief that we can overcome any and all obstacles prevails. When the proposal is ensuring the integrity of our life-support systems, which benefits everyone, why is there a complete about-face, with a fixation on questions about whether we can afford it and whether we have the ability to do it?
When the call is out for a never-ending quest to increase the efficiency of methods to kill and mangle more people with less materiel, the answer is yessir, technology can solve any problem, where there's a will there's a way. When there's a desire to convince people to switch from one brand of toothpaste to another despite there being very little difference between them, the answer is yessir, we have refined public relations techniques capable of convincing people of just about anything. When the call is for increasing our security and health and quality of life by developing energy-efficient technologies and reducing energy-wasteful habits in the home, in the office, and on the road, why is the response the opposite, with mumblings about how tough a problem that is, don't know if it's solvable, don't think we could figure out how to convince people to do that?
Are any significant changes uniform? From my humble meager experience it seems to me it's always the case that some people, species, places, etc are impacted more than others. As of 1997 parts of Alaska had already warmed by 7.2 degrees in just 30 years and the Bering Sea was 10 degrees higher than normal. Some are already projecting the extinction of Polar Bears because they can't move around and reach their prey when there's no solid ice. This also does not bode well for traditional subsistance Inuit people. Some pacific island nations face total drowning. Etc etc.
As far as we can tell (not to a certainty), glaciers once covered large areas, and dinosaurs requiring a lush climate lived in places now inhospitable. And as far as we can tell weren't large numbers of species driven to extinction in the process? How many dinosaur species are still with us? Does that mean we should just sit back and watch while feverishly pushing and pushing to set wheels in motion to snuff out lots more again, possibly including Homo sapiens? Nobody can know for sure whether our extinction would happen until it does, and if it does nobody will be around to know it, so I guess one thing we can know for sure is that no matter what happens nobody will ever know human extinction has happened so why worry? Dinosaurs were very successful, with a documented residence as dominant species for longer than mammals have been in existence so far. It remains to be seen whether dinosaurs will have the last laugh as far as proving to have what it takes to survive a long time.
Epidemics have happened in Nature too. Does that mean it's ok for us to engage in biological warfare, and we should not spend any resources on vaccination or other preventive measures, developing medicines, nor a public health system?
Killing happens all the time in Nature. Does it follow that all laws against murder should be repealed? After all, aren't they the most intrusive form of government regulation and meddling in people's lives? Why is heavy-handed government intrusion endorsed to the hilt on little people whose actions only harm one other person but it is anathema and taboo to have even modest government regulation of big corporations whose actions affect thousands or millions of people?
Air pollution from electricity generators alone - not counting anything related to global warming - kills 30,000 per year in the US. That's more than are killed by all murders, and ten times more than the World Trade Center attack of Sept 11. The cumulative total death toll to date is about 300 times that of Sept 11. Why are vast sums spent on wild goose chases to go after those with tenuous if any connection to Sept 11 and shoot them, torture them, and lock them up incommunicado, but not only is this not done for those guilty of 300 times bigger carnage but they are rewarded with profits and licenses to keep doing it?
Life has carried on despite the extinction holocausts. Life has carried on despite what the Nazis did. Does that mean nobody should have done anything to stop them? After all, nobody could ever have known for sure that the Nazis would take over North America until they actually did it, so shouldn't we have waited, while preoccupying ourselves with all the money we could have made by investing all those massive resources in the stock market instead of the war? And if the Nazis did come swarming over the continent, shouldn't we just place our faith in our magical ability to pull a technological rabit out of the hat in the nick of time and/or have faith God will save us no matter how little we have done to save ourselves?
If a little child wanders into the street, you don't know for sure whether any car will come while the kid is there, and if it does you don't know for sure whether it won't stop in time, in which case the energy you spent getting the child would have been wasted, and you don't know whether if you go out in the street to get the child a car won't come and kill you both, so does that mean the prudent course is to wait while you calculate all these possibilities and watch what happens before deciding whether to get the kid off the street? Another child is born every second but there is only one irreplaceable Earth. Why should we be less protective of her than a child?
Consider these things which have already happened.
A study by scientists at the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded that 160,000 people are already dying every year from side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition, and children in developing nations disproportionately bear the brunt. The more global warming occurs, the higher the death toll will go.
300 million people were forced out of their homes due to flooding during 1998 which at the time was the hottest year on record. Two thirds of the entire nation of Bangladesh was under water.
One hurricane wiped out 90% of the bridges in the nation of Honduras. It was projected to take 6 years to recover.
Bad weather and resulting crop failures were contributing factors to the economic collapse of North Korea.
40% of the land of China is undergoing desertification. They have been experiencing a dust bowl much bigger than what happened here in the 1930s. The Gobi Desert has expanded to within 150 miles of Beijing. A Chinese dust storm in 2001 was so big it dropped dust 7,000 miles away over an area reaching from Canada to Arizona. Millions of tons of topsoil have been lost, which will take centuries to replace. Experts are calling it an "ecological meltdown". Harvests have dropped. When they run out of food that has been stockpiled, world food prices could skyrocket. While much of this is due to over-cultivation, over-pumping, over-grazing, and over-logging, and we will never know for sure how much climate change has contributed so far, this brings up an often overlooked factor: people have been so massively stressing ecosystems that many are near the breaking point, so much of the resilience they had in the past is gone, thus their past ability to cope with change is irrelevant to present reality, and small additional nudges may be enough to push them past the breaking point.
Has this been widely reported in the corporate-funded media?
For more info on climate change, check out:
www.heatisonline.org/main.cfm website run by Ross Gelbspan, author of the book The Heat Is on: The High Stakes Battle over Earth's Threatened Climate; excellent info on the issues, including the large-scale public relations effort by fossil fuel interests, manipulation of science, etc. A text search for exxon within this page found half a dozen links to pages about what the company has been up to, such as funding global warming skeptics, including one who had claimed he did not get oil money, getting people pulled off the international climate panel, and a note that they have been rated worst of all oil majors on climate practices (Isn't it standard practice for a company with a bad record and lacking true integrity to make up for it by trying to snow the public with public relations rather than addressing the reasons why the record is bad and maybe even actually fixing them?).
www.interfaithpower.org works on energy and climate issues from the basis of religious and ethical principles.
www.climatenetwork.org/ Climate Action Network works on a variety of fronts and has a page on what you can do to support legislation etc with links to what citizen organizations are doing. www.climatenetwork.org/uscanweb/resources.htm has links to a report on California and another specific to Los Angeles, plus a bunch of initiatives being taken by states including one by the University of California. It's foolish to sit around waiting for the federal government to act. A number of states and localities are moving forward, but it wouldn't hurt for citizens to encourage them and push all the others to get moving.
www.rmi.org/ Rocky Mountain Institute, founded by Amory Lovins, who is probably the most articulate and incisive person in the world on energy issues. Definitely worth checking out. www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid127.php has info on 400 cities taking climate-related initiatives and www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid331.php has tips on what individuals can do. Be sure to read www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid125.php ; have any of the points made there been widely reported in the major media? If not, any member of the public can tip them off to the golden opportunity to scoop the story, and whenever the media purvey the conventional lines, anyone can talk back to them by writing and citing facts and reasonings from RMI.
A fundamental principle to keep in mind: dumping carbon into the air is wasting a valuable resource. The more efficient an entity is the less it will waste and the more competitive it will be. Really smart entities will realize that a valuable resource can be capitalized on and put to productive use rather than wasted, so they get the benefit of not only reduced costs but also an additional revenue stream. Entities too dumb to get out of their wasteful rut will eventually be uncompetitive and lose out, if we really have a free market. Note that "entity" can be a corporation or a nation or a community, etc.
Just a couple tidbits I happen to have in my files from talks he's given: Leadership on climate has passed from the public to the private sector. Companies are acting like the Kyoto Treaty has already passed, and they are making money buying efficiency instead of fuel no matter whether there's a treaty. Climate protection is profitable because efficiency is cheaper than fuel; the idea climate protection costs is uninformed. RMI helped one of biggest chip makers to reduce carbon emissions 92% while saving money, which may be one of the contributing factors to why they are making money while some others aren't.
-- Walter Epp for7gen àt idiom døt com