It never made sense to me how coral atolls survived the 300ft sea level rise over the past 20000 years, so perfectly just above the water line. Well, now I know:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoll
So, the small number of people actually living on low-lying atolls in Oceania isn't even threatened by sea level rise.
The deeper one digs into this FUD the worse it gets.
Ah, OK. It wasn't quite clear to me on quick reading which side of the argument you came down on, but I see it now. And I even mistyped my response
(Incidentally, you may also want to look at my other posting about the FUD other people bring up about war due to supposed mass migrations from the flooded islands.)
Yes, I should consider the opportunity cost, and so should you. The annual cost of global warming and the annual cost of mitigation are comparable according to the IPCC. But global warming costs only start having to be paid decades from now, while mitigation efforts have to be paid for now, on a massive scale.
If we mitigate, that money is available for economic growth around the world and the development and deployment of new technologies. That's the opportunity cost we pay, namely the opportunity for the world to develop to the point where most nations are so rich that even dealing with global warming isn't a big deal.
What the West should do is promote free trade and immigration around the world, and stop messing with the energy markets. Because if we stopped subsidizing oil, gas, and coal and invested a bit more in STEM education and research, carbon emissions would largely disappear on their own within a few decades anyway, faster than through any heavy-handed government program.
However - the Maldives have 320,000+ inhabitants, who are about to be, quite literally, out to sea.
... Imagine the chaos, hate and anger involved, if the US suddenly had to move all of Hawaii's population onto the continental US (1.3 million).
Please, get some perspective. The entire population of Oceania, excluding Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand (which are far too big to go under), is about 3.2 million people. The number of new immigrants to the US alone per year is 1 million. The US has 40 million foreign born residents, Russia 12 million, Germany 10 million, France 6.5 million, Canada 6 million, and so on. An extra 3.2 million people migrating over the span of a few decades isn't even going to be noticeable. And they are doing it already because most people actually don't like living on isolated rocks in the middle of nowhere with no way of earning hard currency, which is why many of these nations already have negative population growth. In addition, as a simple look at the globe shows you, global warming is going to create far more land arable in Canada, Alaska and Siberia than is lost on a few tiny islands in the Pacific and through additional desertification around the equator.
This is the lower bound.
This is what the IPCC report says:
Limited and early analytical results from integrated analyses of the global costs and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emissions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed costs.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains5-7.html
So, they are not "lower bounds", the costs and benefits of mitigation are "broadly comparable in magnitude".
In different words: stop lying.
Most of these "climate warfare" projects require massive engineering efforts that are, shall we say, very susceptible to cheap, more traditional military intervention.
No "prisoner's dilemma" involved for the politicians: voters in the US and Europe would be tearing their politicians apart over the costs of global warming mitigation. Just look at all the belly-aching over the current recession.
The underlying problem is too hard to solve with current technology. According to Hansen et al, we need to get the CO2 levels down to 350ppm if we want to be safe. This means, not only must we immediately stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we also need to remove some of it.
Hansen is someone who spreads FUD to gain notoriety. Read the IPCC instead. It contains a lot of scary imagery too, but ultimately, you can find a simple cost/benefit analysis, which sums it up:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains5-7.html
For increases in global average temperature of less than 1 to 3ÂC above 1980-1999 levels, some impacts are projected to produce market benefits in some places and sectors while, at the same time, imposing costs in other places and sectors. Global mean losses could be 1 to 5% of GDP for 4ÂC of warming, but regional losses could be substantially higher.
Limited and early analytical results from integrated analyses of the global costs and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emissions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed costs.
The idea that we should dump vast quantities of iron into the ocean in order to mitigate a potential problem that amounts to little more a slight reduction in global GDP is ludicrous. Algal blooms and tinkering with iron content of the ocean is far more dangerous than rising CO2 levels, Hansen's cataclysmic fantasies notwithstanding.
It is a risk management issue. We know there is a risk of global warming. We know it can potentially bring massive (earth altering amounts) losses if unmitigated.
According to the IPCC report, the losses are not "massive", they amount to a few percent of global GDP, comparable to how much it would cost to mitigation. The losses for the US and Europe are even smaller.
Global warming is something we can live with: it causes changes, will impose some costs, but it is not a civilization killer. (Global cooling, on the other hand, is a huge problem. The US and Europe would be in deep trouble if climate went back to the way it was a few thousand years ago.) And carbon emissions will abate over the next couple of decades anyway, as solar and other technologies become more attractive and cheaper.
The question is do we wait uninsured, or do we consider an insurance policy of some sort.
I'm pretty sure dumping massive quantities of iron into the ocean and causing algal blooms is not "insurance", it is pollution.
Some of this kind of makeup might help...
Face recognition software doesn't work like a barcode. Like a medical test, it has some error rate. So, even if people managed to get it down to an error rate of 1%, that means that a search will pull up 10000 people if you're living in a city of 1 million and you restrict the search to the city. Attempts by police to deploy face-based monitoring at airports and other public sites have been spectacular failures.
That's probably both parties represent the majority of normal, relatively sane people who don't want to see their country destroyed by "libertarian" self-serving billionaires who want unlimited freedom for themselves to make money.
Yeah, "normal" people like you prefer hundreds of billions of dollars to be given to bankers and failing industries, and to be wasted on wars, just like both Bush and Obama did. And then, to top it all off, you love making even more debt giving great retirement and medical benefits to old people who never bothered to save for themselves. And the people who are going to end up paying for all that is the middle class.
So you were opposed to tracking down and having to kill Osama bin Laden when he didn't meekly surrender?
I'm opposed to the process by which it happened, and I'm opposed to the president trying to use it for political gain.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, I bet you wouldn't have been saying that four years ago.
I was strongly against both Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think they were a waste of money.
I mean, heck, I'm not a fan of Catholicism, but I'm not rude or arrogant enough to expect to be able to visit French cathedrals wearing beach shorts without getting an old lady jabbing a sharp, painful and accusing finger into my hide, and even if I did, I'd take it as an indication that *I* was the one doing something wrong.
Actually, she's probably just coming on to you. Less than 5% of French go to mass, and only 25% believe in God.
More than 60% of the US and world music market go to UMG, SonyBMG and EMI. Who owns them? UMG is French, Sony BMG is Japanese (it used to be Japanese and German), and EMI is British. Yes, Hollywood and the US music industries pushes restrictive copyright legislation. So do European publishers, directors, writers, and artists, as well as European governments who like to make their media happy. And the legal situation surrounding copyright and fair use is restrictive in Europe already, and has always been.
The DMCA wasn't something invented out of thin air by the US, it was the implementation of a WIPO agreement. Europe implemented the WIPO agreement with a number of directives, including Directive 2001/29/EC, which in some ways is more restrictive than the DMCA. But Europeans don't follow EU politics much; to them, it looks like the US implements some draconian law and then Europe is made to follow, when in fact, the real reason is that both EU and US special interests perform policy laundering at WIPO, and the US just happens to be a bit quicker implementing it.
If you're a geek interested in keeping fair use alive, the "blame the US" approach isn't going to work because the US isn't the primary source of the problem. The problem is media companies. European media companies have much tighter control over European public opinion and politicians, and they love to present these issues as "evil American companies like Google want to steal European culture and impoverish European artists" and at the same time "the evil American government is forcing our poor politicians to implement all these draconian laws that we don't really want to implement but are bullied into". Stop letting yourself be manipulated and get the facts. These laws are going to keep coming until the politics in countries like France, Germany, the UK, and Japan change radically.
Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.
