I understated the number of increasing glaciers. A NASA press release says “SATELLITES SHOW OVERALL INCREASES IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE COVER” here:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020820southseaice.html

Further analysis is here.

One of the things Kolbert (somewhat unemphatically) points out is that while most scientists seem to be in a consensus about the inevitability of climate change, very few of them agree on the outcome or even the general effects of climate change.

A tiny example is here in my home state of Minnesota, which has historically had many of the coldest winters in the lower 48 states on record, change has come in the form of warmer winters and _cooler_ summers. A larger example points to certain climate models of warming periods triggering ice ages.

What Kolbert never talked about is the fact that over almost half a billion years the sun has increased its heat output by 10%, a trend that will continue for the next billion years until the sun novas and/or the galaxy collides with Andromeda (slated to happen about the same time). The earth has its own thermostatic phenomenon to combat the sun’s increasing heat output, called the Terrestrial Carbon-Erosion Cycle. This cycle will eventually be unable to keep up at the current rate, where halfway through the century we will have as much carbon as we had during the Cretecous era when most of the US was an inland ocean and crocodiles swam at the poles.

So if we are in a “natural warming trend” would it be a Good Thing to not try and help it along, considering the effects of Business As Usual will probably amplified? Even if the trend will reverse at some point, wouldn’t it be smart not to extend it several hundred years by our own agency?

I did find the index record for Hansen’s 1988 Senate testimony, in case someone in the US is interested in tracking it down:

Energy Policy Implications of Global Warming: James Hansen, D469 [7JY]
John Firor, D469 [7JY]
Michael MacCracken, D469 [7JY]

“I’d be a lot more sympathetic if advocates specified what existing programs they would cut to free up resources for their shiny new boondog- er, government program, so as to make it a net zero-sum proposal.”

A common net zero-sum proposal is to shift taxes from income to carbon emissions. For example, Paul Krugman had a Slate column on this subject in 1997:
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/green.html

Bruce Sterling argues for tackling global warming without government action.

“… over the subsequent decades that will still do enough damage that we won’t have the resources to spare later for when some real, serious and verifiable direct threat comes along.”

It seems to me that global warming is already a real and serious problem, rather than a speculative problem; but I guess we’ll continue to disagree.

“I did track down the actual abstract to the paper that testimony was based on.”

I know, but I’d like to see the actual testimony, to see whether Hansen’s description of Michaels’ misrepresentation is accurate or not. According to the Senate website, I need to find a federal depository library:
http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/how_to_congressional_record.htm

Unfortunately, I’m in Canada.

Maybe we need to track down the actual testimony. I did track down the actual abstract to the paper that testimony was based on. Maybe calling A “continued exponential growth” was the mistake? It’s a bit ambiguous. Calling B “reduced linear” is even more so – it could be they meant reduced relative to A rather than reduced relative to current trends. In any case, I can see both sides.

To me, this suggests that sooner or later, something will come along that _could_ cause Western civilization to collapse; and so we should watch out for such threats.

I guess I see panics about things like global warming as just such a threat. The threat to our nation I worry about most is demosclerosis — that we have a tendency to take on more and more spending and regulatory commitments, each one like tying another weight to the ankle of a long-distance runner. Each new commitment isn’t deadly in itself, but the sum total of them will ultimately cause the runner to fall. Like the British Empire before it, the American Empire will eventually stretch itself too thin and collapse.

The War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Terrorism, and now the War on Global Warming…each time a new War is proposed to deal with a new source of panic, the advocates say it won’t cost all that much and we’re rich enough to afford it alongside all our other commitments. And so we shave off another fraction of our potential output to handle the new commitment. In the short run it doesn’t seem like much, but in the long run it’s tragic, because exponential growth is a powerful force for good. Even if each new speculative threat prompts us to reduce our GDP growth by a mere fraction of a percent per year, over the subsequent decades that will still do enough damage that we won’t have the resources to spare later for when some real, serious and verifiable direct threat comes along. Like, say, a comet headed for the earth. Or something we haven’t even thought of yet.

I’d like to leave this runner as unencumbered as possible so he remains nimble enough to dodge when he sees the next truck coming.

(I’d be a lot more sympathetic if advocates specified what existing programs they would cut to free up resources for their shiny new boondog- er, government program, so as to make it a net zero-sum proposal.)

“… it sure sounds to me like Scenario A is being sold as the real prediction.”

Maybe we need to track down the actual testimony. (I did a Google search and couldn’t find it on the web.) Hansen: “Scenario A has a fast growth rate for greenhouse gases. Scenarios B and C have a moderate growth rate for greenhouse gases until year 2000, after which greenhouse gases stop increasing in Scenario C. Scenarios B and C also included occasional large volcanic eruptions, while scenario A did not. The objective was to illustrate the broad range of possibilities in the ignorance of how forcings would actually develop. The extreme scenarios (A with fast growth and no volcanos, and C with terminated growth of greenhouse gases) were meant to bracket plausible rates of change. /All of the maps of simulated climate change that I showed in my 1988 testimony were for the intermediate scenario B, because it seemed the most likely of the three scenarios./”
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/

Schmidt: “In fact, in his congressional testimony Hansen _only_ showed results from scenario B, and stated clearly that it was the most probable scenario.”
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/01/schmidt-fear/

“… according to charts on pages 373-374 of State of Fear, Truman, Missouri has gotten colder by 2.5 degrees since 1930, Greenville, SC by 1.5 degrees, and Ann Arbor, MI by one degree. Much of upstate New York has gotten colder since 1930 too. So if we take 1930 as the baseline, you can probably find farmers (of marginally productive crops) in those areas that have been inconvenienced by the cold.”

Okay, thanks for the info.

[Regarding correction for the urban heat island effect:] “He cites a paper ((from SoF p. 384, footnote) Ian G. McKendry”

McKendry’s at UBC (I’m in Vancouver). I’ll see if I can give him a call, find out what he thinks.

“I worried about nuclear war. I worried about killer bees. Somewhere along the way I grew up and realized that the better the scare story, the less likely it is that any of it will come to pass.”

I think it’s reasonable to do some discounting, but I guess my perspective is a little different: from looking at the historical record, all past civilizations _have_ collapsed, for one reason or another. (With ugly consequences. I have a strong interest in twentieth-century Chinese history in particular, and it’s pretty gruesome.) To me, this suggests that sooner or later, something will come along that _could_ cause Western civilization to collapse; and so we should watch out for such threats.

Of course you need to evaluate costs and benefits. You also need to evaluate opportunity costs — global warming isn’t necessarily the biggest problem facing us (personally, I’d put nuclear war at the top of the list), or even the biggest environmental problem. (Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” provides a historical perspective on environmentally-induced collapses: civilization depends on an agricultural base, and if you start losing your agricultural base to deforestation and soil erosion, you’re in deep trouble.) And of course it’s necessary to be sober and objective in evaluating the evidence. But from what I’ve seen, the evidence that global warming is happening, and that it’s bad news, is pretty strong. One of my libertarian friends sent me a Times article which suggests that the Gulf Stream is getting screwed up (which William Calvin has been warning about for a while), which is very bad news for Europe.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1602579,00.html

Killer bees I can’t comment on.

“Claims that we need to shut down the engines of economic progress in order to deal with any one particular threat should be met with a lot of skepticism, because economic progress tends to protect us against all threats, not just the ones that are currently in our field of view.”

Would capping global greenhouse gas emissions really require putting a stop to economic growth? If we had a market in CO2 permits, industries that found it easy to reduce CO2 emissions could sell their permits to industries for which reducing emissions would be much harder. We’ve got an enormously flexible market system that can adapt to all sorts of technological change; would a global cap on CO2 emissions be that difficult to deal with?

I should also mention Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design initiative. Sterling, a science-fiction writer, argues that you’re not going to get anywhere by preaching to people that they need a more sustainable lifestyle; instead what you need is to _seduce_ them into a more sustainable lifestyle by making it more glamorous than the old industrial carbon-belching lifestyle.
http://www.viridiandesign.org/manifesto.html

Glen,
You are grasping at a ‘Slippery Slope’ argument in suggesting that we have to ’shut down the engines of economic progress ‘ in order to reduce co2 emmissions.

What I believe a reasonable culture would do is induce their private sector to adopt newer technology that will reduce the emissions of co2.

If ther eis one thing that I believe, it is that there are only two things that corporate america will respond to, obvious and immediate losss of profits, and laws with the immediate effect of incarceration of the leadership of a company.

Seems pretty clear to me, wither the companies find another way to maintain profitablility or they face incarceration.

My own precautionary principle says you don’t force people to take action (at metaphorical, and possibly actual, gunpoint) unless the expected benefit of that particular action significantly outweighs the cost. Nobody has made a positive case that Kyoto by itself will make much difference in the cost of warming. Some Kyoto advocates have fallen for the “something” falacy of government: “something must be done; this is something; therefore, this must be done”. Some hope it might be a step down a slippery slope towards some future as-yet-unimagined policy that might make a difference, but that future policy would also be more costly. Some simply reject the idea of cost-benefit analysis and regard “doing something for the environment” as worth any cost.

We know for a fact that economic and technological progress makes us ever more capable of dealing with threats of all sorts. The richer we get, the easier it will be to deal with change in general. So the “do nothing” option is actually a positive solution — it means we should keep making progress in our ability to deal with problems and our technical understanding of them.

Claims that we need to shut down the engines of economic progress in order to deal with any one particular threat should be met with a lot of skepticism, because economic progress tends to protect us against all threats, not just the ones that are currently in our field of view.

Both Lomborg and Crichton do a reasonable job of listing their references, and to the degree that I’ve checked them the sources generally bear out the claims being made. It’s the arguments, not the authors making them, that I find convincing.

Glen,
If you are willing to accept the work of a fiction writer (Andromeda Strain, jeez), then I will worry for you.

In order to do a proper threat assessment, you need to understand the problem…

Even a few nukes can be ‘messy’, and the old style MAD was intentionally ‘unthinkable’, just enoug of an immediate threat to get people to _not_ send tanks accross a border in the heat of passion.

As far as ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terror’, ‘war on killer bees’… These may be seen as intentional mis-use of the attention drawn to an immediate threat for ‘other’ motives…

With global warming we have an actual, measurable, scientifically identifi-able trend that may have devastating (but certainly HAS had disrupting) effects on the lives of millions of people. To ignore this is more than irresponsible.

On the other side of the table, you have money and business. A business that operates in a manner that is increasing greenhouse gasses, and that does not want to impact profits in order to change the way that they operate. It is much more feasible financially to support a small number of ’scientists’ and popular authors that it is to retro-fit powerplants, develop new technologies, etc… One costs millions, the other costs billions.

So, you are caught in the middle, who’s interest should you promote and how much weight should you give to their arguments?

I suppose that’s one way to look at it: discount predictions of doom, because of people’s interest in exaggerating threats.

Exactly. I worried about nuclear war. I worried about killer bees. Somewhere along the way I grew up and realized that the better the scare story, the less likely it is that any of it will come to pass. So unlike much of the nation, I managed not to be even slightly worried about the Y2K bug, the alleged “crack baby” epidemic, the alleged epidemic of “school shootings” or the possibility that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Those all turned out to be good calls. Now here’s global warming. How worried should I be?