Mother Jones - Comments for "Global Warming Risks Made Simple"

Madison, my mistake. I thought we were having an intelligent conversation.

Bryson, the God father , peer reviewed the articles on global warming and his conclusion was that they are a bunch of "hooey". End of argument. The God father has spoken.

As long as we're duplicating comments on multiple threads ...

Madison,

Thank you for the argument from authority. Unfortunately, just as consensus may or may not prove anything, authority proves even less. Einstein disagreed with quantum theory. He was wrong. So is Bryson.

Here's the question, in every other field of science, many different viewpoints are presented in the peer reviewed publications. Now it's true that the reviewers are human and may have their own prejudices and biases. But, to think that every reviewer at every publication is so biased that they will not consider printing the dissenting opinions borders on the insane.

However, either there is not enough data to support a peer reviewed article against global warming or there is exactly such a bias held by every single reviewer of every peer reviewed publication.

Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.
The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.
There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the "Little Ice Age," he said in an interview this week.
"However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said.
The Little Ice Age was driven by volcanic activity. That settled down so it is getting warmer, he said.
Humans are polluting the air and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but the effect is tiny, Bryson said.
"It's like there is an elephant charging in and you worry about the fact that there is a fly sitting on its head. It's just a total misplacement of emphasis," he said. "It really isn't science because there's no really good scientific evidence."
Just because almost all of the scientific community believes in man-made global warming proves absolutely nothing, Bryson said. "Consensus doesn't prove anything, in science or anywhere else, except in democracy, maybe."

Kit: it's from Anthony Leiserowitz's study, "American Risk Perceptions: Is Climate Change Dangerous?" published in Risk Analysis, Vol 25, No 6, 2005. You can find it online.

Misanthropic Scott's argument is very similar to the argument Bill Clinton used to convince FOX News tycoon Rupert Mordoch, an unlikely convert, that global warming cannot be overlooked. (Clinton and Murdoch now use the 30% probability figure; that is, even if there is only a 30% that the scientific consensus is right, the risks of inaction are too great to ignore.)

msnbc.msn.com/id/18746241/
gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/29/161615/07

Julia: Your figure of only 7% of Americans as naysayers sounds right to me, but can you source that, please?

thank you, Misanthropic Scott, for correcting the persistently unteachable. the naysayers have redirected world energy for too long already. we've lost a critical decade debating with them. they're only 7 percent of Americans anyway. time to--as General Douglas MacArthur said--go around them.

Actually, what I would say about this is:

1) Why assume economic collapse?
1a) Would the economy collapse from becoming energy independent due to an increase in renewable energy?
1b) Would it collapse from sparking a complete renewable energy industry with the money we currently spend subsidizing oil?
1c) Would it collapse as we reduce from 70-130,000 the number of people who die from air pollution each year?
1d) Would it collapse because the war on terrorism would be simpler and cheaper if the terrorists were no longer so well funded with oil money?

2) Why assume that the human species will survive?
2a) We have not been on this planet very long. Most species don't survive for millions of years. Why assume ours will?
2b) Why misquote the statistics? The conservative IPCC report states a billion climate refugees by 2050, not merely hundreds of millions.

Jim Manzi,

There are a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers that have come out since the IPCC, all of which state that the IPCC estimates are horribly conservative on both the amount of warming and the effects.

There are also new papers coming out pertaining to the acceleration of the ice melt in both Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula, each of which has enough ice to raise sea levels over 20 feet, for a total of over 40 feet. If we are seriously off on the rate, this could be much sooner than forecast by the IPCC.

As for odds of the outcome, the U.S. is the ONLY country in the world that is still debating climate change. The rest of the world has already accepted the facts. But, let's play a game anyway.

Imagine that the odds of catastrophe are only 5%. Imagine that there is a 95% chance that the entire world scientific body on climate change is completely wrong. Now imagine that only 5% of the time that a human crosses a street, that human is hit by a bus. Every time a person crosses the street, 5% chance, boom. 100 people cross a busy intersection in New York City, 5 die. One person walks 20 blocks, there are good odds that the person doesn't make it.

In my imaginary bus scenario, people would be screaming for safer buses or safer street crossings, perhaps with footbridges. People would simply not stand for these odds.

Now translate my admittedly ridiculous example to the real world. We were imagining that there is only a 5% chance that global warming is real, human caused, and packs the potential for catastrophe. However, instead of the screaming people would do about other causes of death, people are saying that we should wait until all the facts are in.

Newsflash!! The odds that the vast majority of scientists publishing real peer-reviewed scientific papers are wrong when compared to the naysayers who are publishing nothing in any peer-reviewed publication are not 95%. So, the odds of humanity getting hit by this bus are far greater than 5%, probably far greater than 50%.

Here's another news flash for you. Societies have collapsed before, Easter Island. Some have completely died out, the Greenland Norse. The difference is that this time, the society is not on a small island. It is not even in a large area of North America, the Anasazi. This time it's global. This time there will be nowhere else to go. This time will be the end of civilization as we know it. This time just may be human extinction. Are the odds only 5%? Is that low enough to take this risk?

As the man says in the video, we only get to play this game once. We're betting our entire species on the outcome.

Actually my comments(posting on logging increased...) were for global warming risks made simple! They seem to have whizzed into the wrong column!!!

This guy should have done some research. Amazingly, he is not the first person to have thought of odds and impacts of scenarios in this way. He might start with the decades-long modeling project executed by the Yale School of Forestry and Department of Economics to do for real what he is showing on a whiteboard. For that matter, he might have red the UN IPCC WG2 and WG3 reports which reference a lot of relevant research on this question.

Here are some (example) problems with his video:

1. His "bad case" is overblown and rhetorical. Under a reasonable scenario for global economic and population growth (Scenario A1B), the IPCC projects about 2.8C increase in global temperatures by 2100. According to any competent modelers (for example, the Yale project), this would lead to about break-even net global economic impacts, i.e., the positive benefits of warming would about equal the negative impacts. It's only when you get to warming of about 4C in 22nd and 23rd centuries that you, according to the IPCC, see a net reduction in global GDP of about 1- 5%. That's a lot of money, but it's hardly the Armageddon that he is describing.

2. According to the IPCC, no global climate model currently predicts any of the disaster scenarios he describes for the next century.

3. Without any quantitative consideration of odds of an outcome, you could apply this same 2X2 matrix argument to the risk of space aliens descending from the sky and killing everybody. Why don't we have crash programs that risk global depression against space aliens and a meteor strike and a global pandemic based on a modified version of Avian Flu and, and and....? Because the list of such anxieties is endless and our resources are finite.