Global Warming to Climate change to Climate Catastrophe.

[Loren Pechtel]

Perpetual sustainable economic growth, which is not the same as sustainable development that does not involve ever more use of resources, hence is sustainable, is a Delusional idea.

The sun is going to burn out in five billion years. If our descendants aren't already extinct by then, then they will leave by starship or die, regardless of whether we have resources left at that point. Therefore perpetual economic development is unnecessary. We don't need our economic system to last forever; we only need it to last five billion years. Therefore your theoretical argument from "pure physics" to the effect that normal human behavior cannot continue forever is irrelevant. Is there some unsubstitutable resource that you can show we will run out of within five billion years if we keep using more and more of it?

Note: to answer this question, you need to stop writing "finite" and start writing finite numbers.

1) This 5 billion year lifespan for the Earth isn't a realistic model. After even 10% of that time Earth is going to be a pretty unpleasant place for an unprotected human.

2) I don't think that is even relevant. If humanity survives I would be surprised if Earth exists at that point anyway. Using a great mass of material just to make gravity is wasteful!

 

[ruby sparks]

The nations with the best environmental record are the capitalist ones....

Doubly dubious coming from an American.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Water despite all the oceans is becoming in short supply. Desalination is energy intensive.

Yes, but note that reverse osmosis based desalinization is something that can easily be turned on and off--thus making it a good candidate to use the extra power from unreliable sources like solar and wind. Instead of designing your plant to run the pumps continuously you pump the water up somewhere high enough to supply the pressure you need for the membranes. The plant keeps operating while the cloud goes in front of the sun.

Part of the Arab Israeli dispute we don't hear much about is water

Yup, but note that most of this is due to water usage--the Israelis do things like drip water their crops and make various uses of grey water. An Israeli gallon goes a lot farther than a Palestinian gallon and this gets reported as being unfair.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That many people prefer death over taxes is insane, but apparently this is the world in which we live.

If by death we mean "the death of other people", then people have shown a pretty consistent willingness to kill over taxation for as long as there have been taxes... People get murderous in a hurry if they decide taxes are unfair somehow.

People get murderous about taxes when they feel those taxes are being used to exploit--the money being used to support those the taxpayers feel are unworthy of what they receive. That's a very different issue than taxes being used to do something necessary for society as a whole. And note that something like a hefty carbon tax doesn't need to actually be a tax increase. We could cut other taxes to make it revenue neutral.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What happens if or when billions of people who are currently low level consumers, namely the poor of the world, raise their level of consumption (as is their right to do}, to that of consumers in developed nations such as the US? Let's say 8 to 10 billion people using resources on a par with the average US citizen.

A friend of mine likes to use the phrase "self-correcting" when anyone talks about climate change or anything environmental. For example he states that we could cut down trees as much as we want but there will always be more trees to cut down. I know, apparently he's never been to Rapa Nui.

Some people rarely escape their houses. For these folks who never open their windows or shut off their TVs or air conditioners, or even wish to take a walk outside it doesn't matter. They never walk on grass or see a sky, sunset, visit a national park, take a canoe ride, hike, mow the lawn or hear birds.

The earth is certainly capable of sustaining billions and billions and billions of more humans, in effect turning itself into more people, literally. But that has a cost in terms of other species, open spaces, etc. It's a question of what kind of planet one wishes to inhabit as much as how many people can it support.

And many of those that do are doing nothing beyond basically dipping their toes in.

In the first mile of a trail I see a lot more people than I see deeper in--and those in the first mile are mostly not equipped to go deeper anyway. Past that first mile I would say the encounter frequency drops by 90%.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Maybe if you keep saying it, it'll be true.

Maybe if you think it's not true, you should articulate why.

No, you just carry on. I'll stick to common sense and what most accepted science says.

So I am left to wonder: Did you not read my post; Did you not understand my post; Or do you not have any arguments to present that counter my post?

I am disinterested in dogmatic claims. Present arguments, or GTFO.

ETA - I see you edited your response.

If it's bleeding obvious, you should be easily able to articulate what, exactly, is wrong with my post.

Because the greens say it's the problem. Never mind that the green approach is guaranteed to fail, they just don't show that part of the graph in their predictions. Even what they do print, though--you can see the trend line is down. The green approach gives nothing that will change it--thus it will continue down until we reach a point where we aren't dependent on any resources that aren't just lying around--that is, early stone age. That's the green "solution".

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Just out of curiosity, where did you get those figures, that if human population was cut drastically, there'd still be an equivalent environmental catastrophe in a few decades time? A 90% cut would merely defer the disaster for 120 years, you said. Please don't tell me you just made that up.

The issue with warming is CO2. What we are producing isn't going to be removed from the atmosphere naturally on a human time scale and thus it will rise with CO2 usage without regard for time. Cut the population 90%, you cut the CO2 90% and thus it takes 10 times as long to reach the same levels--but reach them we will. A 90% population cut also means at least 90% less work on improving the situation.

 

[ruby sparks]

Cut the population 90%, you cut the CO2 90% and thus it takes 10 times as long to reach the same levels--but reach them we will.

More sums apparently pulled out of, um, thin air. Citation for that please. Or stop making stuff up.

 

[Bomb#20]

Just to clarify, anthropogenic climate change is a problem whose scope is demonstrably independent of population levels. The population level (ceteris paribus) has an effect only on the timing of the problem, not on its existence.

For example, let us say that the 'tipping point' at which atmospheric CO₂ levels will qualify as 'disastrous' will come in 12 years, with current population levels and per capita fossil fuel use.

If we unleashed a super virus that killed 50% of humans, leaving the remainder using the same per capita amount of fossil fuel as before, then this disaster will now occur in 24 years. Kill 90% of people, and the disaster STILL happens - albeit not for 120 years.

That calculation appears to take for granted that the rate at which the amount of atmospheric CO₂ rises equals the rate at which we add it. That doesn't seem reasonable. CO₂ is constantly being removed from the atmosphere by natural processes. The ground is loaded with carbon -- fossil fuels, peat moss, limestone and dolomite -- that was once in the atmosphere and got sequestered. Consequently, if you cut the population in half the time until disaster more than doubles.

Any solution must involve reducing the net global CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere to the (near zero) level at which natural processes can recycle the surplus CO₂ (or even to below that level). The only way to hit that target via population reductions is to reduce the population to almost zero.

If by "recycle" you're talking about the natural sequestration I'm talking about, what's your basis for saying it's near zero? Wikipedia says "currently, the rate carbon dioxide release by the burning of fossil fuels is about double the net uptake by vegetation and the ocean."

 

[ruby sparks]

It isn't anywhere near zero. That was just more of Bilby's homemade arithmetic.

 

[Bomb#20]

Perpetual sustainable economic growth, which is not the same as sustainable development that does not involve ever more use of resources, hence is sustainable, is a Delusional idea.

The sun is going to burn out in five billion years. ... Is there some unsubstitutable resource that you can show we will run out of within five billion years if we keep using more and more of it?

1) This 5 billion year lifespan for the Earth isn't a realistic model. After even 10% of that time Earth is going to be a pretty unpleasant place for an unprotected human.

Well hey, if we need an economy sustainable for only 500 million years, that makes my counter-argument to DBT ten times stronger than it already was.

But your 10% statement assumes we leave the Earth where it is. There's no reason we can't keep Earth pleasant for the full 5 billion years if we simply move it outward in sync with the gradual increase in the radius of the solar system's habitable zone. We're faced with a celestial mechanics duplicate of our current global warming problem, on a much larger scale and a much longer time-frame, but the issues are pretty much the same. We could lengthen the Earth's orbit, probably for the same order of magnitude of money bilby says we need to spend decarbonizing our economy. But we probably won't, for the same reasons we won't deal with AGW. The obstacles are political, not technical.

2) I don't think that is even relevant. If humanity survives I would be surprised if Earth exists at that point anyway. Using a great mass of material just to make gravity is wasteful!

But using a great mass of material just to make gravity is the natural high-entropy outcome of the law of gravity. Which is to say, wasteful it may be, but we probably can't shoot pieces of the earth into more useful roles in space faster than meteorites keep delivering new mass to the Earth.

 

[DBT]

A counter argument? Sorry, I didn't notice. Forget about the life of the Sun. We are already degrading our environment, biodiversity, etc, our cities are crowded and congested and the sheer scale of meeting the needs of the world population, ever increasing demand as living standards are lifted, is likely to become unsustainable within a century. This is not just about power generation.

 

[PyramidHead]

Add the fact that population is never likely to exceed 1.5 times it's current value, and you have my point.

But where is the reasoning that this is a good number, and we should plan our allocation and production around it, rather than drastically, radically reducing it and relieving the burden on our allocation and production models?

Population will stop growing in the next few decades, and will never exceed 15 billion - unless we take active steps to stop that from occurring.

We already have sufficient resources for that many people to live comfortably, and nothing has yet run out (or even run short).

I agree, but I have no illusions that simply having enough stuff to enable comfortable living for everyone means that anything like a majority of them will actually live comfortable lives. That's why I keep talking about not just the amount of resources, which as you point out are inexhaustible at all timescales worth considering, but how they are distributed throughout society, who gets the homes, who gets the food, what gets repurposed, what gets hoarded, and who is at risk when these decisions are made. Those factors are collectively called the economy, and I am not foolish enough to think that it will supply our descendants with comfortable lives simply because we have enough resources to give it to them. It doesn't do that now, as I'm sure you're aware, and we are just beginning to feel the pressures of climate change in a large-scale way. Multiplying the number of people by 1.5 while simultaneously exerting a gigantic strain upon an economy that is already unable to appropriately distribute the resources it has is not something to idly watch taking place.

Our current method for ensuring provision of resources (mixed mode capitalism with government regulation) need not change - things will continue to improve under this system with only the routine tweaks that are a characteristic of the way such systems operate.

They won't improve fast enough, and while they improve they will make the problem worse by an equal or greater amount. The changes that need to happen are structural and related to guiding principles, not tweaks, not anymore.

Population growth is not constant; And it is a given that barring some positive action to increase birthrates, it will very shortly come to an end.

Our survival is not threatened by resource shortages, nor by population growth. It is threatened by climate change. This is not a resource use nor a population problem, it is a problem of allowing atmospheric CO2 levels to rise unchecked.

I wasn't using "constant" the way you thought, I was just expressing how it seems that you look at the population level and its future course over the next century as an inevitability like the motion of the planets, something already guaranteed to happen in a certain way, while the economic questions of how to cover the members of this future population are all up to our discretion.

I am not convinced that it wouldn't, but I value the freedom of the existing population over any hypothetical benefit from coercing them to have fewer children than they desire - given that we can see that when women have an informed choice (ie are educated, have access to and control of contraception, and have a reasonable expectation that any children they have will survive to adulthood), they on average choose to have a number of children that is somewhat below replacement level.

One assumption that jumps out of this remark is that as long as we are "somewhat below replacement level" things are within acceptable limits--again, treating the current population level or something like it as something we just have to work around economically.

You justify this by saying that women should be free from coercion in their reproductive choices, and I agree, but coercion is not just negative. Most developed nations positively reward choosing to reproduce. Under circumstances where perpetual economic progress seemed feasible, this makes sense, but we are now leaving that era of history. Societal policies play a big role in the "informed" part of having an informed choice. There are many ways that population growth could be discouraged, or at least not rewarded, without draconian measures. I'm certainly not suggesting forcibly sterilizing people. But in the same way that economic trends can be harnessed and reversed with government incentives, so too can the often thoughtless way that new people are added to the world. It would be at least as big of a challenge as making the rich pay their fair share, or rapidly transitioning to non-profitable energy sources.

Why settle for replacement level or something like it? Why assume that the level at which population growth naturally tails off and stops is something we are stuck with? We don't assume that about the way businesses would naturally choose to pay their employees, the safety measures they would enact (or fail to enact), nor the extent to which they will naturally monopolize industries. We make substantial policy decisions to redirect all those natural market tendencies, and if somebody just showed you a graph that projected how businesses will eventually run out of employees if they don't pay them enough or at least pretend to care about their well-being, and the problem will thus solve itself, you'd rightly think that something important was being swept under the rug.

 

[PyramidHead]

It's a species thing, sure, but it also just boils down to a decision of ours that we are free to make at any time.

We can either have capitalism or we can have a habitable planet.

The nations with the best environmental record are the capitalist ones--the ones with the wealth to be able to afford to look to the future and the sufficiently open press to make an issue of things the powers that be would prefer to hush up.

The best environmental record is nowhere near enough to stop what is going to happen, if we are to trust what the world's top scientists are telling us in this report.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

A counter argument? Sorry, I didn't notice. Forget about the life of the Sun. We are already degrading our environment, biodiversity, etc, our cities are crowded and congested and the sheer scale of meeting the needs of the world population, ever increasing demand as living standards are lifted, is likely to become unsustainable within a century. This is not just about power generation.

Back in IIDB days there was a thread about sea level rise. Currently it is predicted to rise one meter over the next century. That's a lot, but I believe it will rise much more. My estimate then was 10 meters, which I think is closer to the truth. But even one meter will be catastrophic for many habitable human zones.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It's a species thing, sure, but it also just boils down to a decision of ours that we are free to make at any time.

We can either have capitalism or we can have a habitable planet.

The nations with the best environmental record are the capitalist ones--the ones with the wealth to be able to afford to look to the future and the sufficiently open press to make an issue of things the powers that be would prefer to hush up.

The best environmental record is nowhere near enough to stop what is going to happen, if we are to trust what the world's top scientists are telling us in this report.

Humans are competitive, often to a fault. Sometimes disparate tribes amalgamate either under external threat or internal force. Presently, environmental catastrophe is just not a big enough threat to that critical mass of humanity, hence there will be a period of great conflict before and if anything substantial occurs in this regard. We seem to respond to bogeymen, even manufactured ones like Jews.

Nice post #93.

 

[bilby]

Just to clarify, anthropogenic climate change is a problem whose scope is demonstrably independent of population levels. The population level (ceteris paribus) has an effect only on the timing of the problem, not on its existence.

For example, let us say that the 'tipping point' at which atmospheric CO₂ levels will qualify as 'disastrous' will come in 12 years, with current population levels and per capita fossil fuel use.

If we unleashed a super virus that killed 50% of humans, leaving the remainder using the same per capita amount of fossil fuel as before, then this disaster will now occur in 24 years. Kill 90% of people, and the disaster STILL happens - albeit not for 120 years.

That calculation appears to take for granted that the rate at which the amount of atmospheric CO₂ rises equals the rate at which we add it. That doesn't seem reasonable. CO₂ is constantly being removed from the atmosphere by natural processes. The ground is loaded with carbon -- fossil fuels, peat moss, limestone and dolomite -- that was once in the atmosphere and got sequestered. Consequently, if you cut the population in half the time until disaster more than doubles.

Any solution must involve reducing the net global CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere to the (near zero) level at which natural processes can recycle the surplus CO₂ (or even to below that level). The only way to hit that target via population reductions is to reduce the population to almost zero.

If by "recycle" you're talking about the natural sequestration I'm talking about, what's your basis for saying it's near zero? Wikipedia says "currently, the rate carbon dioxide release by the burning of fossil fuels is about double the net uptake by vegetation and the ocean."

Thank you for actually providing reasons rather than flatly saying that it's 'obvious' that I am wrong.

It seems that my assumption about the order of magnitude of natural sink rates is flawed; I shall re-work my numbers and see what I come up with (but that will likely need to wait until Monday).

Just crudely, it would seem that even taking your values for the recycling rate of excess CO₂, we would require a very significant population reduction to have any serious effect (ceteris paribus); And I still argue that taxes are preferable to a genocide on a scale that would make Stalin, Pot, Mao, and Hitler look like cuddly humanitarians.

IMO, supporting the world population is the task at hand - we worry about climate change because it could cause widespread death and suffering. Suggesting genocide as the solution seems to me to be counterproductive.

We could prevent arson by burning down all the houses so that the arsonists have nothing to attack. But it's a totally insane 'solution', so let's not do that.

 

[PyramidHead]

You know, it's worth pointing out that easing back on incentives for having children and spreading awareness about population levels wouldn't actually be the same thing as genocide.

 

[bilby]

You know, it's worth pointing out that easing back on incentives for having children and spreading awareness about population levels wouldn't actually be the same thing as genocide.

It's also not the same thing as rapidly and dramatically cutting population.

Indeed, I would very much doubt that it would have much impact at all - the same effort put into providing a good, general, primary education to girls in Africa would likely be far more effective.

I certainly don't have any major objection to removing any government incentives to have children. But I seriously doubt that doing so would have any worthwhile impact on climate change - and certainly not in the next century or so.

A certain amount of new population is 'locked in' - because the girls born yesterday will start having children in two or three decades time; and will still mostly be alive in sixty or seventy years.

Cutting birth rates takes a few decades to lead to a drop in population - particularly where it is combined with increasing life expectancy.

The only way to cut population numbers significantly in a timescale measured in decades rather than centuries is to increase death rates. That's why I object strongly to the suggestion that a smaller population is a solution to climate change in the next few decades. That solution could only be implemented by genocide.

 

[PyramidHead]

You know, it's worth pointing out that easing back on incentives for having children and spreading awareness about population levels wouldn't actually be the same thing as genocide.

It's also not the same thing as rapidly and dramatically cutting population.

Indeed, I would very much doubt that it would have much impact at all - the same effort put into providing a good, general, primary education to girls in Africa would likely be far more effective.

I certainly don't have any major objection to removing any government incentives to have children. But I seriously doubt that doing so would have any worthwhile impact on climate change - and certainly not in the next century or so.

I wouldn't want to remove the incentives whose function is to help the child that is born, because that would be punishing the child unjustly. But in a hypothetical scenario where we needed to leverage every tool at our disposal, I see a valid place for policies/campaigns that would (a) remind everyone of the impact of having a child, (b) encouraging the adoption of children who are already born and need caregivers, (c) generously reward people who do not have children, and (d) dialing back on the incentives that might cause reluctant couples to be more willing to have a child. All combined with comprehensive education, contraception, and abortion services. Create a culture where having biological children is regarded with the same shake of the head that people who wear mink fur sometimes receive, where it's taboo to just carry a fetus to term without doing due diligence and checking the adoption registry to see if an abortion wouldn't be better for the planet. Get that total back down below 6 billion, or even less, simply by not replacing the ones who naturally die with one or two more. It won't solve our problems, but then again neither will any other measure on its own. And regardless, it will have prevented whatever suffering the people who are not born would have endured, whether by climate-related pressures or otherwise in their lives, while simultaneously making it easier to maintain a comfortable standard of living for everyone else.