11 thoughts on “Climate Change”

  1. “Far from signaling a resignation to climate change, resilience, adaption and mitigation all shift energy away from holding back the tide and toward innovation and creativity in meeting it. In fact, those are precisely what have fueled whatever positive development there has been in human history (and admittedly, some negative as well). The theoretical physicist David Deutsch points out that pessimism about future trends is actually more “blindly optimistic” than genuine optimism because it assumes that we can know the future.”

    This. Especially the last sentence. The Earth isn’t static, any number of things can happen to change our climate. Rather foolish to think we live in the ideal climate or that things will not change ever.

  2. Climate change on a global scale happened thousands of years ago with the end of the last major ice age. Humanity existed then without the benefit of technology, science or large numbers of people. Somehow, they adapted to the changes that took place. Are modern humans less capable of adapting to change than our stone aged ancestors? If so, then perhaps we deserve to go extinct.

  3. Some of the comments are remarkably ignorant.

    Adaptation alone isn’t going to cut it. We will need to adapt even if we stop emitting CO2 abruptly. But if we don’t cut those emissions, adaptation to the world that’s coming will not be possible. How do you adapt the Nile Delta or Bangladesh, or Miami Beach, for that matter, to a one-meter rise in sea level? You don’t. You have millions of displaced refugees to deal with, and fewer ways to feed them.

    Answer to that one is that at some point you build stuff that can tolerate the flooded areas and build stuff that can’t further up hill. It’s a near trivial adaptation too since even in the absence of any sort of plan, people will do that naturally.

    1. Thats just crazy! It’s not possible to pile dirt and rock a meter high, even given the roughly 200 years the IPCC would allow for such a program. I don’t think we possess the technology to pile up dirt that slowly. Perhaps we could try vacuum deposition like we do with semiconductors.

    2. I live in Seabrook Texas, fourteen feet above sea level. I don’t give a sh!t about sea level rise. We can build a dike or we can move. It’s not that big a problem. We are talking scores of years, not months. I welcome warmer weather and rising sea levels. I also welcome cooler weather and dropping sea levels. Higher CO2 means a greener planet for sure. I am glad for that.

  4. As the article points out, climate change can be mitigated against. It will have to be, even if we magically quit dumping CO2 into the atmosphere tomorrow.

    But if you don’t even accept that you have a problem, fixing it will require blind luck.

    It’s also true that the first rule of messes is “don’t make it bigger.” (Correlary to the first rule of holes.) Every kilo of CO2 not emitted now is one that we don’t have to mitigate later. So, if we can cut CO2 without making other problems, we should.

    1. CO2 is a critical trace element in the atmosphere for all CO2 absorbing plant life and therefore for all oxygen breathing land dwellers. Much higher levels of CO2 have existed in the past and the planet was both greener and wetter during that epoch. The precautionary principle would seem to fall more squarely on adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, not removing it.

      1. I’m pretty sure that carbon dioxide is a molecule.

        Got any other good ones! Or do you wish to make yourself look smarter than you actually are?

    2. But if you don’t even accept that you have a problem, fixing it will require

      …evidence that there is, in fact, a problem.

      Which, that’s generally a predictable consequence of a problem: evidence that it exists.

    3. We know one catastrophic problem is the coming ice age, which will reduce the population of all the hockey playing countries to about that of a hockey arena. CO2 might help mitigate that, or slow its onslaught.

      But instead, the public is enthralled by tales of a future climate that’s as bad as the one where they all go for vacation, with lots of heat, rain, and palm trees or deserts. Even if Africa, everybody sticks to the equatorial region where the heat is, their ancestors having gone on vaction tens of thousands of years ago and deciding to stay where it’s warm.

      So yes, for alarmists to fix a climate problem will require blind luck, because they make squirrels look like Einstein.

Comments are closed.