The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second is the claim that changes we have good reason to expect if we do not take appropriate action to prevent them will have very bad consequences for us.
I am with you, in particular on the idea that the public policy proposals of the leftists here are for the most part insane.
But to steelman the one legit/reasonable leftist argument, the focus should be on the (small) probability that the destabilized (2 then 3 degrees of warming which then leads to rapid acceleration from there…) case might occur.
And you and I at least probably agree that the chance is small. But non-zero.
But then you need to ask the 3rd question: will the leftist policy prescriptions be the difference between avoiding that “destabilized” case or not. The Paris Accords if implemented fully by everyone will supposedly reduce global average temperatures by between 0.1 and 0.3 degrees. What are the odds that THAT would be the difference between destabilization and not? Vanishingly small imo. And the odds that the world would agree on the energy consumption reduction needed to *actually* have a chance of making the difference between destabilization and not are also incredibly tiny.
And THAT is my issue with most of the leftist policy prescriptions here - especially the immoral immediate constriction of supply of fossil fuels preventing the billions of the world’s poorest from better access to highly available reliable low cost energy. The chances they will actually help are minimal, but the harm to the overall economy, and especially to the world’s poorest in the short and medium term, is significant.
There is a much clearer mechanism for warming stabilizing than destabilizing, given that we are in an interglacial that has already lasted as long as they usually last.
Yes, I agree that this is why the probability of destabilizing (2 and 3 degrees of warming and then accelerating) is *low*, and surely much lower than most leftists state or imply. But you cannot rule it out completely.
And this is why it’s important to address the likelihood of leftist policy prescriptions to be the difference between destabilization or not, and why the economics matter.
CO2 and “global warming” are the exception to the common sense understanding that “well, every little bit helps”.
Bu unlike for “clean air” and “clean water”, in fact in the case of global warming, for all the other reasons you cite, every little bit helps ONLY IF it is the difference between avoiding “destabilization” or not. If it is not - as IMO is overwhelmingly likely - than most of the “every little bit helps” not only did not help, but it actively hurt, since the resulting economics hurts world GDP, and is disproportionately harmful to the world’s poor by immorally denying them access to low cost highly available reliable energy to prosper (and adapt to any harmful regional effects of global warming)
I have no doubt that they are largely pushing the idea for political power means. If they were serious about doing a transition from fossil fuels, a Carbon tax that grows with time would be the ideal mechanism of implementing it - and would allow compensating projects that permanently remove Carbon from the atmosphere. The moralistic and self-interested motivations of the left though do not invalidate the climate change issues.
Correct. You will note that none of my arguments were based on "the left says it so it must be false."
My claim is, first, that the predictable negative effects of climate change over this century are much smaller than the catastrophist rhetoric implies and, second, that there are predictable positive effects which might be larger.
The argument that temperatures rising a couple degrees will cause mass extinction is the most laughable one. Most species have been around since long before the glaciers retreated about 12000 years ago. At that time they coped just fine with a rapid 10 degree C warming, so they should be able to take a couple degree warming in stride.
AI will make interstellar travel possible, allowing humans to expand infinitely to other planets in the universe, with endless resources. Until the universe expands too far and starts thinning.
It is amazing what a scientist like me can extrapolate using a small amount of evidence and some theorizing.
Mark Twain has a wonderful discussion of that, using the example of the changing length of the Mississippi, which had been shortening itself by cutting off loops, extrapolated both backwards and forwards.
By coincidence, just today I came across a remarkable wish list for the future by Robert Boyle from the late 17th century. Most of his science and technology wish list has been realized. I'm especially looking forward to the first two also being achieved.
The Soviet Union started and encouraged all sorts of activism in the West. It’s easy. You need merely pay for their recreational chemicals. The only drawback is that you can’t get them to do anything before noon.
This fails to engage with the most common argument I hear for global warming being very bad: that it will cause a major increase in hurricanes, regional droughts, regional floods, etc.--in general, more of the rare but very bad weather events that cause death, property destruction, and crop failures whenever they happen. I agree that wealthy societies can adapt to these issues, but poorer countries with next to no slack are going to be hit much harder by any increase in natural disasters.
The IPCC projections don't imply a major increase in hurricanes. They imply a decrease in low level (categories 1-3) ones, an increase in the strength but not the number of category 4 and 5.
Note that CO2 fertilization decreases drought, since it decreases water requirements for plants. It also substantially increases the yield of C3 crops (wheat and rice but not maize).
And the fundamental problem with any of the "go green" BS is that it will keep poorer countries poor! The advice to review Dr. Pielke's work on disasters and their diminishing effects is seconded. Over the past 100 years, our response to disasters has been to reduce deaths 100-fold! ALL made possible through development of energy. If you want to understand trends in extreme weather, look at weather data, not economic data.
You will also observe from Pielke's work that there is no attribution to hurricane frequency, or other natural disasters, to humans. Finally, no where in the IPCC documents will you find suggestions that civilization is threatened. Nada. Rien. Nothing.
I believed the implication was there, particularly when you said "poorer countries...are going to be hit much harder by any increase in natural disasters." It was not my intention to offend, only rather to point out the obvious discrepancies between those who are energy rich and those who are energy poor.
I agree, you never said directly that civilization was threatened, though I'm sure you agree that there are many climatists who make such claims. Your words, heartfelt I'm sure and no disrespect intended, imply that climate change is something to be feared.
It isn't. To paraphrase Dr. Curie, nothing in the natural world should be feared; it should only be understood.
Our understanding of climate is not nearly sophisticated enough to predict that there will be both regional droughts and regional floods as a result of a slight increase in the average temperature. I could find it plausible that we could understand things enough to say "There will be more rain" or "There will be less rain." But the assertion that there will both be more rain in a bad way and less rain in a bad way is such an obvious alarmist ploy that I can't believe proponents aren't laughed out of the room.
If we can adapt well to climate change, we should also be able to adapt well to El Niño years, which are effectively temporary climate change spikes. We demonstrably cannot, not because of the increased temperature but because of all the downstream effects on severe weather it produces.
Sea level rise may only extend in a few miles, but the safe buildable area in many places, including the entire Gulf of Mexico and most of the Eastern Seaboard, recedes substantially more due to increased hurricane severity. An increase in temperature is an increase in energy, and peak severity of extreme weather therefore rises, even for blizzards.
What do you make of this recently published study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0? Would be astonishing if true. Assume the fact that it was published in Nature rather than an econ journal is a tipoff.
Data on heat deaths seem to be incomplete and often unreliable. Based on what is available (EM-DAT.bet), the most recent decade has many fewer deaths from heat compared to the previous decade.
The mortality they find is not mostly from extreme temperatures, just from temperatures above or below the optimum. That's probably the source of the nine to one factoid.
However, The Lancet could not resist distorting the presentation of the data. On the left side (cold-related) the graph used increments of 50, while the right side (heat) used increments of 10.
Even if the work is honest, as I think Gasparini's probably is, measuring the relation between temperature and mortality is a hard problem. What you want to know is not the total mortality from heat and from cold but how it will change due to global warming. The logic of Gasparini's analysis, if I understand it, is that the marginal effect of warming is greater on heat deaths (increase) than on cold death's (decrease) even though total heat deaths are less than total cold deaths. That isn't impossible although it's surprising, given the size of the difference in total mortality.
Humans have adapted to large climatic changes in the past largely through migration. As climate change makes equatorial region less habitable, other regions like Russia and Canada, will become more so. The obvious solution to a changing climate is for hundreds of millions to move away from those regions most severely affected and into regions less affected or even positively affects. Do you think the Russians will let 100's of millions of climate refugees into their country? WIll the Canadians? Or the Americans?
THIS is the threat posed by climate change, not the 10 meter rise in sea level over the next millennium that is already baked into the cake (assuming we stop adding CO2 into the atmosphere on this century).
You are exaggerating the scale of the effect by a couple of orders of magnitude. Why would you expect an increase of average equatorial temperatures of two degrees to cause hundreds of millions of people to leave?
Take a look at the maps of average temperature and population density that I linked to and think about the implications.
There were scattered societies that reached fairly high levels of sophistication during the Ice Age, here's an example from 23,000 years ago that had developed sedentism and appears to have been doing an early form of farming (I found the vid fascinating).
The reason why these Ice Age settlements are scattered and there seems to be little progress is because one climate shift creates a favorable environment that allows progress to happen, and then another climate shift causes the end of that progress as the settlement is abandoned and the people revert to lower level of societal complexity.
So here and there humans already had the necessary ingredients to develop complex civilizations 11,000 years before the earliest megalith building cultures appeared in the Levant. In the span of time from Ohalo II to Gobekli Tepe we see little change in human societal complexity. Over the same span of time after Gobekli Tepe, we developed our modern civilization. What happened?
A plausible candidate was the end of the highly variable climate around 11,000 years ago. After that is was off to the races. Through industrialization humans are now restoring that world of fluctuating climate.
A likely effect of changing climate are changes in rainfall patterns and soil moisture that will make current lifeways untenable in various spots. The historical solution for when this happens was migration., which I pointed out. You wish to hand wave this away. How are you so sure you are right?
I don't understand your point. If we observe dense populations at temperature X that's evidence that raising the local temperature elsewhere from X-2 to X is unlikely to displace much of that population. Do you disagree? If you do, what is your basis for thinking that warming at the projected rate will cause hundreds of millions to migrate?
You are ignoring why the initial population densities are what they are. Simply because dense population exists at location X at temperature T and at location Y at temperature T-2, does not mean that going to temperature T at location Y will not pose a problem.
Suppose both locations support large populations through dryland farming. Further suppose location Y is dryer than X. Temperature T at location Y makes the climate unsuitable to dryland farming, whereas it does not at X.
In the Sahel region land once suitable for grazing can become more arid with warming, causing the populations who once lived there to more south into already settled areas, which can result in political instability.
We saw this happen recently with the poor harvest in 2012 driving up grain prices, causing discontent and political unrest in Syria, which developed into civil war. War sent waves of migrants heading for Europe, which has created political instability there.
As temperature rises more marginal places will suffer hard times and the political instability that generates.
You are attributing migration to climate change, as if bad harvests and wars did not happen without it.
There is no reason to assume that all change is bad. One of the things you can discover in the IPCC report is that some projections show climate change greening the Sahara and Sahel.
Waves of migrants, about a million a year, came to the US in the years before and after WWI without global warming. Waves of migrants have been coming to Europe because European welfare states are better places to be than Syria or Africa.
All I am saying is you are assuming that changing the climate from where it has been for the entire period in which human civilization existed will have no serious effects and so nothing should be done to move off of fossil fuel. I think you are overly optimistic, but you are going to believe what you believe and that is ok. I'm not going to still be alive in the second half of this century to find out.
Yes Minister, S1 E4, "Big Brother", aired Mar 17, 1980.
The Honorable Jim Hacker, MP bumps into Tom Sargent (now in the opposition) in the House of Commons smoking room. It turns out the previous government has worked out safety standards for the National Database ("Big Brother") and administrative delay through masterful inaction by Sir Humphrey Appleby was the only reason the policy was not implemented. He shared Sir Humphrey's five stage stalling plan.
"Stage One: Humphrey will say that the administration is in its early months and there’s an awful lot of other things to get on with. (Tom clearly knows his stuff. That is just what Humphrey said to me the day before yesterday.)
Stage Two: If I persist past Stage One, he’ll say that he quite appreciates the intention, something certainly ought to be done — but is this the right way to achieve it?
Stage Three: If I’m still undeterred he will shift his ground from how I do it to when I do it, i.e. ‘Minister, this is not the time, for all sorts of reasons.’
Stage Four: Lots of Ministers settle for Stage Three according to Tom. But if not, he will then say that the policy has run into difficulties — technical, political and/or legal. (Legal difficulties are best because they can be made totally incomprehensible and can go on for ever.)
Stage Five: Finally, because the first four stages have taken up to three years, the last stage is to say that ‘we’re getting rather near to the run-up to the next general election — so we can’t be sure of getting the policy through’."
I see that we are now in the "something certainly ought to be done — but is this the right way to achieve it" stage :)
Yes, Minister was an excellent series. In reality, most things governments want to compel us to do should not be done. As applied to those things, the Humpreys are doing good work. In the show, Humphrey and his bureaucracy are against any change in the status quo, unless it expands their power.
On the current topic, we are not the "something certainly ought to be done" phase. Individuals should be free to adapt but "something" should not be done on a large scale given the lack of plausible downsides, the upsides, and the insane cost of most those somethings.
Some people may be insulated from the effects of the coming climate changes, but we can already see the kinds of things that are possible. We have already changed the climate enough to affect the Sahel Monsoon and how many people died in the famines in North Africa in the 1970's and 1980's. Was that ok? Thousands of people have died in recent heat waves in Europe. Is that ok? And is it going to be ok to see more summers with months of 120 degree temperatures in places like Arizona? People in Arizona I talk to are not happy about only being able to go outside at 5am. Assuming that because change always happens, change will always be ok is ... well, it seems a ridiculous assumption. Change always causes pain and that is not avoidable, but the scale of changes that are coming are not like anything we have seen. Is a commensurate level of suffering just .., not a problem?
In Tucson last year we had zero days above 120°F, the highest temperature was 112°F on July 20. This is not much different than the past, Aug 4, 1944 also hit 112°F. I go out frequently in the day time, as long as you have shoes and sun protection it’s not a disaster. Europeans should stop tearing down nuclear plants, and invest in air conditioning, instead of windmills and solar panels.
I live in Scottsdale, AZ. It can get very hot here in the summer. It's comfortable at 5am largely due to the very low humidity. I much prefer 115 F here to 100 F in Texas, where I previously lived. When it's really hot, we just don't spend a lot of time outside. That's easy because we leave our air conditioned homes to go to our air conditioned cars to get to our air conditioned offices or shops. At least for now, we have a large nuclear power station that provides reliable energy. The low humidity is such that short exposures to even the highest summer temperatures is not a big deal.
Keeping energy affordable is crucial for people to endure high -- or low -- temperatures.
You are also failing to consider that far more people die from cold than heat.
You'd hate St Louis. we used to say "100 degrees F and 100% humidity." Only partly a joke. And I don't think we get as many 100 degree days in my old hometown north of STL as we did in the 1950s.
I would add: Places like Phoenix/Scottsdale could do far more to keep high temperatures down by reducing the urban heat island effect than by cutting out fossil fuels.
thousands of people died in the heatwaves of the 30s. thousands more will die over the coming years. people in Arizona may not be happy, but neither are they moving out! I believe the point of Dr. Friedman's essay here was that the scale of changes imagined by the climatists will not come to fruition. yet, they all seem to believe that if we make drastic changes to our society, we might make a difference in 80 or 90 years. might - I say, because when I ask them directly, they are unable to tell me how much decline in temperature will occur. they are also unable to tell me why a 2 degree change in temp is so bad, when our normal seasons see swings of 10 degrees or more.
we need to stop worrying about the future generations and start solving today's very real drug and crime and terrorism problems.
Lots more Europeans die when it's cold than when it's hot. Just look at https://www.euromomo.eu/ and you can clearly see that mortality peaks in winter.
But of course climate change means that temperatures get both hotter in some seasons _and_ colder in some seasons. So, lots more dying because of cold may be in line with problems caused by climate change.
Assuming that immediate changes to ameliorate CO2 increase won’t have comparable or even worse effects is also ridiculous. What do you see as our alternatives?
I am with you, in particular on the idea that the public policy proposals of the leftists here are for the most part insane.
But to steelman the one legit/reasonable leftist argument, the focus should be on the (small) probability that the destabilized (2 then 3 degrees of warming which then leads to rapid acceleration from there…) case might occur.
And you and I at least probably agree that the chance is small. But non-zero.
But then you need to ask the 3rd question: will the leftist policy prescriptions be the difference between avoiding that “destabilized” case or not. The Paris Accords if implemented fully by everyone will supposedly reduce global average temperatures by between 0.1 and 0.3 degrees. What are the odds that THAT would be the difference between destabilization and not? Vanishingly small imo. And the odds that the world would agree on the energy consumption reduction needed to *actually* have a chance of making the difference between destabilization and not are also incredibly tiny.
And THAT is my issue with most of the leftist policy prescriptions here - especially the immoral immediate constriction of supply of fossil fuels preventing the billions of the world’s poorest from better access to highly available reliable low cost energy. The chances they will actually help are minimal, but the harm to the overall economy, and especially to the world’s poorest in the short and medium term, is significant.
There is a much clearer mechanism for warming stabilizing than destabilizing, given that we are in an interglacial that has already lasted as long as they usually last.
Yes, I agree that this is why the probability of destabilizing (2 and 3 degrees of warming and then accelerating) is *low*, and surely much lower than most leftists state or imply. But you cannot rule it out completely.
And this is why it’s important to address the likelihood of leftist policy prescriptions to be the difference between destabilization or not, and why the economics matter.
CO2 and “global warming” are the exception to the common sense understanding that “well, every little bit helps”.
Bu unlike for “clean air” and “clean water”, in fact in the case of global warming, for all the other reasons you cite, every little bit helps ONLY IF it is the difference between avoiding “destabilization” or not. If it is not - as IMO is overwhelmingly likely - than most of the “every little bit helps” not only did not help, but it actively hurt, since the resulting economics hurts world GDP, and is disproportionately harmful to the world’s poor by immorally denying them access to low cost highly available reliable energy to prosper (and adapt to any harmful regional effects of global warming)
On the assumption, implicit or explicit, that the recent/pre-industrial temperature is optimal, see Roger Pielke's piece: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/when-the-climate-was-perfect
I have no doubt that they are largely pushing the idea for political power means. If they were serious about doing a transition from fossil fuels, a Carbon tax that grows with time would be the ideal mechanism of implementing it - and would allow compensating projects that permanently remove Carbon from the atmosphere. The moralistic and self-interested motivations of the left though do not invalidate the climate change issues.
Correct. You will note that none of my arguments were based on "the left says it so it must be false."
My claim is, first, that the predictable negative effects of climate change over this century are much smaller than the catastrophist rhetoric implies and, second, that there are predictable positive effects which might be larger.
If they were truly serious we'd be building nukes.
The argument that temperatures rising a couple degrees will cause mass extinction is the most laughable one. Most species have been around since long before the glaciers retreated about 12000 years ago. At that time they coped just fine with a rapid 10 degree C warming, so they should be able to take a couple degree warming in stride.
Species extinction is much more likely due to loss of appropriate environment, hunting and/or introduction of new species into the ecology.
AI will make interstellar travel possible, allowing humans to expand infinitely to other planets in the universe, with endless resources. Until the universe expands too far and starts thinning.
It is amazing what a scientist like me can extrapolate using a small amount of evidence and some theorizing.
Mark Twain has a wonderful discussion of that, using the example of the changing length of the Mississippi, which had been shortening itself by cutting off loops, extrapolated both backwards and forwards.
By coincidence, just today I came across a remarkable wish list for the future by Robert Boyle from the late 17th century. Most of his science and technology wish list has been realized. I'm especially looking forward to the first two also being achieved.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/6nkYj
The first part of the argument is by no means open and shut:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666496823000456
The Soviet Union started and encouraged all sorts of activism in the West. It’s easy. You need merely pay for their recreational chemicals. The only drawback is that you can’t get them to do anything before noon.
I thought we’re supposed to make charcoal for gas masks from the peach pits.
This fails to engage with the most common argument I hear for global warming being very bad: that it will cause a major increase in hurricanes, regional droughts, regional floods, etc.--in general, more of the rare but very bad weather events that cause death, property destruction, and crop failures whenever they happen. I agree that wealthy societies can adapt to these issues, but poorer countries with next to no slack are going to be hit much harder by any increase in natural disasters.
The IPCC projections don't imply a major increase in hurricanes. They imply a decrease in low level (categories 1-3) ones, an increase in the strength but not the number of category 4 and 5.
Note that CO2 fertilization decreases drought, since it decreases water requirements for plants. It also substantially increases the yield of C3 crops (wheat and rice but not maize).
See Roger Pielke’s “The Honest Broker” Substack for an authoritative answer on extreme weather events. Or even the IPCC.
And the fundamental problem with any of the "go green" BS is that it will keep poorer countries poor! The advice to review Dr. Pielke's work on disasters and their diminishing effects is seconded. Over the past 100 years, our response to disasters has been to reduce deaths 100-fold! ALL made possible through development of energy. If you want to understand trends in extreme weather, look at weather data, not economic data.
You will also observe from Pielke's work that there is no attribution to hurricane frequency, or other natural disasters, to humans. Finally, no where in the IPCC documents will you find suggestions that civilization is threatened. Nada. Rien. Nothing.
Did I claim that poor countries should do anything in particular? No. Did I claim that civilization is threatened? Also no (it is not).
I believed the implication was there, particularly when you said "poorer countries...are going to be hit much harder by any increase in natural disasters." It was not my intention to offend, only rather to point out the obvious discrepancies between those who are energy rich and those who are energy poor.
I agree, you never said directly that civilization was threatened, though I'm sure you agree that there are many climatists who make such claims. Your words, heartfelt I'm sure and no disrespect intended, imply that climate change is something to be feared.
It isn't. To paraphrase Dr. Curie, nothing in the natural world should be feared; it should only be understood.
Our understanding of climate is not nearly sophisticated enough to predict that there will be both regional droughts and regional floods as a result of a slight increase in the average temperature. I could find it plausible that we could understand things enough to say "There will be more rain" or "There will be less rain." But the assertion that there will both be more rain in a bad way and less rain in a bad way is such an obvious alarmist ploy that I can't believe proponents aren't laughed out of the room.
If we can adapt well to climate change, we should also be able to adapt well to El Niño years, which are effectively temporary climate change spikes. We demonstrably cannot, not because of the increased temperature but because of all the downstream effects on severe weather it produces.
Sea level rise may only extend in a few miles, but the safe buildable area in many places, including the entire Gulf of Mexico and most of the Eastern Seaboard, recedes substantially more due to increased hurricane severity. An increase in temperature is an increase in energy, and peak severity of extreme weather therefore rises, even for blizzards.
What do you make of this recently published study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0? Would be astonishing if true. Assume the fact that it was published in Nature rather than an econ journal is a tipoff.
Data on heat deaths seem to be incomplete and often unreliable. Based on what is available (EM-DAT.bet), the most recent decade has many fewer deaths from heat compared to the previous decade.
There is a literature that tries to estimate the effect of temperature on mortality by statistical analysis of massive amounts of data, for each city every day's temperature and mortality. I discussed it in two past posts, https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/temperature-mortality-and-climate and https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/temperature-income-and-mortality.
The mortality they find is not mostly from extreme temperatures, just from temperatures above or below the optimum. That's probably the source of the nine to one factoid.
Studies differ in the multiplier for cold-related deaths vs. heat-related deaths (from 3 to 13, if I recall). I was thinking of The Lancet for the 9 cold-related death for each heat-related death. However, on checking, it was actually 10:1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(23)00023-2/fulltext
However, The Lancet could not resist distorting the presentation of the data. On the left side (cold-related) the graph used increments of 50, while the right side (heat) used increments of 10.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/07/29/the-lancets-scientific-chicanery-on-mortality-exposed-by-co2-coalition/
I see that in one of your posts, you note a different Lancet piece with a 17 cold to 1 heat ratio.
Even if the work is honest, as I think Gasparini's probably is, measuring the relation between temperature and mortality is a hard problem. What you want to know is not the total mortality from heat and from cold but how it will change due to global warming. The logic of Gasparini's analysis, if I understand it, is that the marginal effect of warming is greater on heat deaths (increase) than on cold death's (decrease) even though total heat deaths are less than total cold deaths. That isn't impossible although it's surprising, given the size of the difference in total mortality.
Humans have adapted to large climatic changes in the past largely through migration. As climate change makes equatorial region less habitable, other regions like Russia and Canada, will become more so. The obvious solution to a changing climate is for hundreds of millions to move away from those regions most severely affected and into regions less affected or even positively affects. Do you think the Russians will let 100's of millions of climate refugees into their country? WIll the Canadians? Or the Americans?
THIS is the threat posed by climate change, not the 10 meter rise in sea level over the next millennium that is already baked into the cake (assuming we stop adding CO2 into the atmosphere on this century).
You are exaggerating the scale of the effect by a couple of orders of magnitude. Why would you expect an increase of average equatorial temperatures of two degrees to cause hundreds of millions of people to leave?
Take a look at the maps of average temperature and population density that I linked to and think about the implications.
How would you know this? Temperatures have been quite stable since the end of the last Ice Age.
https://cdn.uanews.arizona.edu/s3fs-public/styles/az_small/public/Fig2_5xStretch.jpg?VersionId=EOg6varxkNs8GVgb5jI2q7jynpjpGzBz&itok=DLzE9Hum
There were scattered societies that reached fairly high levels of sophistication during the Ice Age, here's an example from 23,000 years ago that had developed sedentism and appears to have been doing an early form of farming (I found the vid fascinating).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjUCbk8MSQY&t=1s
The reason why these Ice Age settlements are scattered and there seems to be little progress is because one climate shift creates a favorable environment that allows progress to happen, and then another climate shift causes the end of that progress as the settlement is abandoned and the people revert to lower level of societal complexity.
So here and there humans already had the necessary ingredients to develop complex civilizations 11,000 years before the earliest megalith building cultures appeared in the Levant. In the span of time from Ohalo II to Gobekli Tepe we see little change in human societal complexity. Over the same span of time after Gobekli Tepe, we developed our modern civilization. What happened?
A plausible candidate was the end of the highly variable climate around 11,000 years ago. After that is was off to the races. Through industrialization humans are now restoring that world of fluctuating climate.
A likely effect of changing climate are changes in rainfall patterns and soil moisture that will make current lifeways untenable in various spots. The historical solution for when this happens was migration., which I pointed out. You wish to hand wave this away. How are you so sure you are right?
I don't understand your point. If we observe dense populations at temperature X that's evidence that raising the local temperature elsewhere from X-2 to X is unlikely to displace much of that population. Do you disagree? If you do, what is your basis for thinking that warming at the projected rate will cause hundreds of millions to migrate?
You are ignoring why the initial population densities are what they are. Simply because dense population exists at location X at temperature T and at location Y at temperature T-2, does not mean that going to temperature T at location Y will not pose a problem.
Suppose both locations support large populations through dryland farming. Further suppose location Y is dryer than X. Temperature T at location Y makes the climate unsuitable to dryland farming, whereas it does not at X.
In the Sahel region land once suitable for grazing can become more arid with warming, causing the populations who once lived there to more south into already settled areas, which can result in political instability.
We saw this happen recently with the poor harvest in 2012 driving up grain prices, causing discontent and political unrest in Syria, which developed into civil war. War sent waves of migrants heading for Europe, which has created political instability there.
As temperature rises more marginal places will suffer hard times and the political instability that generates.
You are attributing migration to climate change, as if bad harvests and wars did not happen without it.
There is no reason to assume that all change is bad. One of the things you can discover in the IPCC report is that some projections show climate change greening the Sahara and Sahel.
Waves of migrants, about a million a year, came to the US in the years before and after WWI without global warming. Waves of migrants have been coming to Europe because European welfare states are better places to be than Syria or Africa.
All I am saying is you are assuming that changing the climate from where it has been for the entire period in which human civilization existed will have no serious effects and so nothing should be done to move off of fossil fuel. I think you are overly optimistic, but you are going to believe what you believe and that is ok. I'm not going to still be alive in the second half of this century to find out.
Most important is that it is unlikely that humans can control the climate in any case.
Yes Minister, S1 E4, "Big Brother", aired Mar 17, 1980.
The Honorable Jim Hacker, MP bumps into Tom Sargent (now in the opposition) in the House of Commons smoking room. It turns out the previous government has worked out safety standards for the National Database ("Big Brother") and administrative delay through masterful inaction by Sir Humphrey Appleby was the only reason the policy was not implemented. He shared Sir Humphrey's five stage stalling plan.
"Stage One: Humphrey will say that the administration is in its early months and there’s an awful lot of other things to get on with. (Tom clearly knows his stuff. That is just what Humphrey said to me the day before yesterday.)
Stage Two: If I persist past Stage One, he’ll say that he quite appreciates the intention, something certainly ought to be done — but is this the right way to achieve it?
Stage Three: If I’m still undeterred he will shift his ground from how I do it to when I do it, i.e. ‘Minister, this is not the time, for all sorts of reasons.’
Stage Four: Lots of Ministers settle for Stage Three according to Tom. But if not, he will then say that the policy has run into difficulties — technical, political and/or legal. (Legal difficulties are best because they can be made totally incomprehensible and can go on for ever.)
Stage Five: Finally, because the first four stages have taken up to three years, the last stage is to say that ‘we’re getting rather near to the run-up to the next general election — so we can’t be sure of getting the policy through’."
I see that we are now in the "something certainly ought to be done — but is this the right way to achieve it" stage :)
Yes, Minister was an excellent series. In reality, most things governments want to compel us to do should not be done. As applied to those things, the Humpreys are doing good work. In the show, Humphrey and his bureaucracy are against any change in the status quo, unless it expands their power.
On the current topic, we are not the "something certainly ought to be done" phase. Individuals should be free to adapt but "something" should not be done on a large scale given the lack of plausible downsides, the upsides, and the insane cost of most those somethings.
Some people may be insulated from the effects of the coming climate changes, but we can already see the kinds of things that are possible. We have already changed the climate enough to affect the Sahel Monsoon and how many people died in the famines in North Africa in the 1970's and 1980's. Was that ok? Thousands of people have died in recent heat waves in Europe. Is that ok? And is it going to be ok to see more summers with months of 120 degree temperatures in places like Arizona? People in Arizona I talk to are not happy about only being able to go outside at 5am. Assuming that because change always happens, change will always be ok is ... well, it seems a ridiculous assumption. Change always causes pain and that is not avoidable, but the scale of changes that are coming are not like anything we have seen. Is a commensurate level of suffering just .., not a problem?
In Tucson last year we had zero days above 120°F, the highest temperature was 112°F on July 20. This is not much different than the past, Aug 4, 1944 also hit 112°F. I go out frequently in the day time, as long as you have shoes and sun protection it’s not a disaster. Europeans should stop tearing down nuclear plants, and invest in air conditioning, instead of windmills and solar panels.
I live in Scottsdale, AZ. It can get very hot here in the summer. It's comfortable at 5am largely due to the very low humidity. I much prefer 115 F here to 100 F in Texas, where I previously lived. When it's really hot, we just don't spend a lot of time outside. That's easy because we leave our air conditioned homes to go to our air conditioned cars to get to our air conditioned offices or shops. At least for now, we have a large nuclear power station that provides reliable energy. The low humidity is such that short exposures to even the highest summer temperatures is not a big deal.
Keeping energy affordable is crucial for people to endure high -- or low -- temperatures.
You are also failing to consider that far more people die from cold than heat.
You'd hate St Louis. we used to say "100 degrees F and 100% humidity." Only partly a joke. And I don't think we get as many 100 degree days in my old hometown north of STL as we did in the 1950s.
Yes, St. Louis is not for me!
I would add: Places like Phoenix/Scottsdale could do far more to keep high temperatures down by reducing the urban heat island effect than by cutting out fossil fuels.
thousands of people died in the heatwaves of the 30s. thousands more will die over the coming years. people in Arizona may not be happy, but neither are they moving out! I believe the point of Dr. Friedman's essay here was that the scale of changes imagined by the climatists will not come to fruition. yet, they all seem to believe that if we make drastic changes to our society, we might make a difference in 80 or 90 years. might - I say, because when I ask them directly, they are unable to tell me how much decline in temperature will occur. they are also unable to tell me why a 2 degree change in temp is so bad, when our normal seasons see swings of 10 degrees or more.
we need to stop worrying about the future generations and start solving today's very real drug and crime and terrorism problems.
Lots more Europeans die when it's cold than when it's hot. Just look at https://www.euromomo.eu/ and you can clearly see that mortality peaks in winter.
Thanks. A useful link.
But of course climate change means that temperatures get both hotter in some seasons _and_ colder in some seasons. So, lots more dying because of cold may be in line with problems caused by climate change.
While "climate change" may refer to anything, the expected change from global warming is milder winters and warmer summers.
Assuming that immediate changes to ameliorate CO2 increase won’t have comparable or even worse effects is also ridiculous. What do you see as our alternatives?