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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (63700)	5/6/2008 11:19:15 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542213

Well, first of all, Romm's adaptation pieces that I posted earlier were responses to Pielke's articles in Nature that your second (third? is that part of "David's" comment?) comment references. Second, as for the first article: 1. Climate scientists frequently don't know much about economics. That is why most of them defer to others on politics and policy, and talk about the science. I'm sure that most conomists, mathematicians and statisticians feel the same way, but some, like Lomborg (just to name the most widely quoted statistician who writes extensively on climate science), apparently believe think that they can talk about authoritatively about climatology--and more importantly, many others who read them somehow think that they can talk about climatology. 2. Regarding sunk costs, stranded investments and network externalities. The writer certainly has a point. But plenty of people who do know about economics and policy have addressed those issues. It is precisely those issues that in large measure make confronting this issue so difficult. If fossil fuels weren't such a basic part of our economy, there wouldn't be a problem--we could easily develop alternatives to them, and people would adapt to those alternatives relatively easily. 3. His question, “Do we invest today in a less efficient technology A that reduces GHGs X% for the next 30 years, or do we delay Z years and develop a technology B that reduces GHGs Y*X% for 30 years, and avoid making an irreversible investment into technology A?” makes the assumption that investments in technology A today will be irreversible 30 years down the road. Nothing is standing still. The real question is, can we begin using technologies for producing energy that will accomplish the same things that are today accomplished with fossil fuels but that don't have carbon emissions. It will be fine that there may be something 30 years down the road that is more efficient that what would use today. We can use that then. But the CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing today. We have already built in a rise of well over 1 degree C over and above what are experiencing today, and have built in, due to simply inertia and plans already made a rise in CO2 of over 450 ppm, the number that most scientists believe is a "magic" number that, if we remain over it for a decade, we may well have reached a tipping point that cannot be unwound. Some scientists believe that we have already reached that tipping point. I don't know where that point is, I only know that if we continue business as usual--and that includes intensity reductions, rather than actual emission reductions--we will certainly reach the tipping point. And the way the ice has been melting in the arctic, in Greenland, and in glaciers around the world, it may be very soon, and will almost certainly be sooner than the IPCC predicted, as their predictions have already proven to be conservative.