Dude, look at the map of climate zones sometime. Look at the range of normal temperatures, and the range of extreme temperatures. The entire shift they are talking about is basically moving one climate zone north -- order of 100 miles. It is utterly lost in the noise. It isn't frog slowly "boiling" in a pot. It is frog in a pot that is 15 C (that is, rather cold) on average (maybe) but that has a range of maybe 5 to 10 C either way on a daily basis, an average that itself varies by a lot more than 20 C annually in much of the world, getting raised to a pot that -- if we don't condemn the poorest people in the world to remain poor for most of the next century and do keep burning coal to make electricity to make their lives better, cheaper, and uplift them out of 18th century poverty and into (I dunno) maybe the 20th century -- will go up 2 whole degrees C. Frogs don't cook at 17 C. The frog might well be more comfortable. I would.
I do like the way you minimize the impact of spending order of a trillion dollars a year combatting CO_2 without recognizing that this is a choice, and it comes at the expense of other ways we might spend the money -- like ending world poverty, which would probably cost less than half of that. You worry about a future catastrophe. How about the ongoing catastrophe, the catastrophe right now, caused by spending all of this money in measures that: a) benefit the very energy companies you no doubt would condemn as the culprits far more than any other groups -- so much so that if CAGW theory didn't exist, they would have a strong motivation to invent it. Anything that increases the marginal cost of energy is going to increase the profits of energy companies before it does anything else, because they make marginal profits. b) don't even work. Carbon trading is an expensive joke. Thorium might work (Uranium does work) but the same people who hate CO_2 hate U235 even more. Wind energy is an expensive joke nearly everywhere, suffering as well from massive NIMBY syndrome and for very good reason. Most other resources such as geothermal or hydro are already exploited and/or regional. Natural gas is lovely but again it is a carbon based fuel, everybody NIMBY's fracking, and I personally like it for heating houses and cooking and hate the thought of using it all up making electricity.
The only two contenders for replacing the coal infrastructure in the long run are solar, largely PV solar, and fusion. Solar isn't a good candidate for replacing coal, but it can certainly eke it out. It isn't ready for prime time as a replacement because electricity is difficult and expensive to store in anything vaguely like the quantities needed to sustain demand at night, and is difficult to transport the 5000 mile plus distances needed to e.g. provide power to the entire temperate zone and points north in the winter, especially if one plans to use that power to heat houses because burning fuel isn't allowed. There is a disconnect so vast that it is difficult to begin to describe it there. We don't have the storage technology, and there are no feasible alternatives visible in the technological pipeline to provide it although there are a bunch of very expensive projects to demonstrate how to do it lots of very expensive ways. Could a breakthrough make this all work? Sure. And if and when it does, one won't need to subsidize the transition or promote it, it will just happen because electricity will be cheaper that way.
Nuclear fusion would solve the problem once and for all for the projected future of the human species. The problem there is that it is like saying that "we should run our energy infrasttructure using magic" because so far getting steady state fusion energy from anything less than balls of mostly hydrogen a million miles or so across just doesn't seem to work. Sure, maybe Lockheed-Martin will do as they just promised and deliver commercial fusion in four years and six months (counting down), but if they do again we won't have to "do" anything -- in a decade or so nobody will burn coal to make energy not because it is bad but because it is expensive. And how silly everybody will look! Think of all the people killed so far by the diversion of public money into the pockets of the rich. The military-industrial complex needed something to war against once the cold war ended (because people tend not to apply the usual standards of rational thought and cost/benefit analysis during times of war, they are expected to stiffen their upper lip and suffer for "the cause") and look! In less than a decade they found it! No coincidence, I gotta say.
And what's with the not "wanting" TCS to be 3 C, but wanting warming to be extreme for ten years? Theoretically it should be 1 to 1.5 C. We have only the weakest of possible arguments for anything beyond that, and in all the rest of science we test those arguments against nature, not the other way around. So thank you for clearly demonstrating the weird cognitive dissonance and scientific inversion I was talking about. Instead of saying "Of course I want TCS to be 1 C, and hope that `the pause' continues for several more decades or that global temperatures even drop some as evidence that it is" you want to punish people -- in particular Senator Inhofe (sp) -- for daring to think that it might not be 3 C, or 5 C, for thinking that maybe it is just barely possible that oceans won't rise even the 30 cm or so that they might rise over the next century (compared to the 20 cm or so that they rose last century) if warming continues at a less-than-catastrophic rate.
You do realize what you sound like, don't you? You sound just like a Christian. Somebody points out that we really don't have any good reason to believe that Jesus even existed, and we have excellent reasons to doubt that if he existed, he was probably not magic, that prayer does not work, that there is no heaven and is no hell and is no life after death, and that there is really no evidence for the existence of God (a prior condition for Jesus, if he existed, to be anything but a man subject to the still more specific prior condition that the God in question had to be the Jewish God of all of the Gods of all of the racial groups on the planet, and insane besides). The Christian then hems and haws, talks about all of the "evidence" backing their claims of existence and divinity (much of which, like walking on water or coming back from the dead, most rational people would call evidence against either claim as both are in complete disagreement with empirically supported scientifically consistent belief) and simultaneously claim that they love you while secretly hoping that you will get struck by lightning right now so that everybody will see what happens to nonbelievers so they can come around to True Belief before they die and are damned.
Hey, at least you are half-honest. You have a political agenda, and are willing (and openly hopeful) that people suffer and die worldwide so you can push it because you know what is best for everyone and even if your beliefs are wrong you are certain they should do what you think they should do and damn the cost in human life and misery.
I'd suggest giving full honesty a try, though. You have no idea what the TCS is. Neither do I. Neither does Gavin Schmidt, or James Hansen, or Phil Jones, or Michael Mann (if you know who any of them are). We have models that aren't working terribly well to either hindcast the past or forecast the future of when the models were run that suggest that if CO_2 goes up to close to 1000 ppm, temperatures might go up to as much as 3.5 C warmer than today, although those same models have runs where it goes up by much more, and some runs where it doesn't go up at all or even drops (and fail in countless other ways to have any predictive validity). So far temperatures are following the warming schedule associated with basically no increase in CO_2 at all (from when the models were run). If extrapolated to 2100, they suggest a warming less than 2 C, much less if we in fact do, as sheer economics suggests that we will, convert away from coal to cheaper forms of energy. So instead of pretending to a knowledge we don't have, how about if we acknowledge our ignorance and let the people of the world make their own decisions about what is "best" or "most likely" given all of the information and not some sort of Pascal's Wager supported by flimsy evidence.
After all, we have no idea what the optimum temperature or climate for the planet is. For almost all of the last 600 million years, temperatures have been much warmer (and CO_2 levels much higher) than they are today and the planetary biosphere has been enormously happy and productive. For most of the Holocene temperatures have been warmer than the present -- they are still short (in all probability) of what they were during the Holocene Optimum 9000 or so years ago and are most definitely lower than the peak temperatures reached during the Eemian interglacial 100,000 years ago without human help or the help of CO_2. We do know that the "little ice age" was the coldest single century of the entire Holocene.
We also know that the climate is not stationary. Nor is it "separable". We cannot disentangle human influence from natural influence in the non-stationary process. Indeed, our evidence about the climate state of the planet from over 50 years ago sucks, and sucks worse the further back you go in the thermometric era. You go back 300 or more years ago and it really sucks. It is literally impossible to point to any aspect of this non-stationary, complext, nonlinear, chaotic, highly multivariate process and say "Look, humans caused this", and this is going to continue to be true no matter how many times both sensationalist news media and scientists who should know better but who make a living from the hysteria say otherwise.
In fifty years, we might have solved the climate problem, although I think that computationally it is more likely to take most of the century as we are a long, long way away from the Kolmogorov scale of the Navier-Stokes system and we have an absolutely appalling lack of knowledge of the Earth's detailed state anyway. Long before then, simple progress in science and technology will probably have rendered it all moot. Solar technology is already ALMOST mature enough to run on its own, basically break even in cost in many locations and likely to get differentially cheaper over time. And hey, I have hope for fusion. Or LFTR. Or that people will get off of their high horse and stop opposing nuclear AND CO_2 AND claiming that they don't want to bring about the collapse of civilization.
In the meantime, maybe we can work on world poverty. 2 billion people will thank you if you back off on the measures that make coal-based electricity more expensive AND spend the money that is currently being diverted into demonizing CO_2 providing food, education, shelter, protection, and economic opportunity to people who currently live in 100 square feet of tin-roof-covered sidewalk. They won't be alive in a century -- many of them won't be alive in ten years -- to see whether or not you are right in your belief that we are catastrophe bound if we don't destroy human civilization so we can all live like that, but they are live right now and personally I think they are a much higher priority on the ethical scale pending some sound evidence that a catastrophe is in fact underway.
Just sayin'
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