Freeman Dyson: The Question of Global Warming
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The basic problem is this: it's pretty clear that if we add extra CO2 to the atmosphere, the planet will get warmer. And it's also clear that if the planet gets warmer, then there will be bad effects. Thus we really should be able to come up with some sort of dollars-per-ton value (let's call it K) for exactly how much harm is caused by CO2 emissions and work from there, perhaps applying some sort of tax to properly take into account the externalities of CO2 emissions.
The problem is that sensible estimates for the value of K vary by many orders of magnitude, and values which are not sensible but are nonetheless widely implicitly accepted vary by an additional bunch of orders of magnitude on either end. First, we have the uncertainty of exactly how much CO2 causes exactly how much warming. Secondly, we have the uncertainty of how much warming causes how much harm -- again, several orders of magnitude in the sensible estimates.
And that's without getting into the additional problems of expressing total worldwide harm in dollars (if we make Siberia into great farmland but drown Tonga is that a net loss or a net gain?) which I'm not gonna even talk about.
Now, if we could all accept that there's a genuine question to be answered about how big K is, and that there are still enormous error bars involved in determining this quantity, then we might be able to get down to having the sensible and important discussion which we as a species really need to be having at this point in history.
Unfortunately, the majority of the voices we hear nowadays are coming from the extremes -- either the Al Gores and Ted Turners of the world who want us to believe that K is huge, or the folks who want us to believe that K is zero. (Actually I'm not sure that the K = 0 folks really exist in large numbers, but they're a convenient strawman for those who believe K is huge.)
I don't know what the solution is, but as usual it would help if the media would hire a few more people who actually had some clue about the way science works.
Thankfully, it seems a topic like this can at least be discussed on HN. I've seen some scientists' discenting views published in mainstream British press... The resulting outcry was not pretty.
Edit: I just remembered something funny that's related. I went with my son's class on a field trip to the planetarium once. Instead of the nice star show everyone was expecting, the kids were shown a film about global warming. That wasn't so bad, except that it was the worst kind of propaganda: millions of people are going to die in flooding and other natural disasters, millions more will die of malaria, all kinds of cute animals are going to die, etc, etc... unless you kids grow up to do something about it. How low do you have to stoop to propagandize grade-school children by scaring the crap out of them?! Anyway, the film ended with some advice about turning off dripping faucets (I swear)! The lights were turned on and we all looked at each other in stunned silence. Then one hilarious child said, quite loudly, "Do as we say, or hurricanes will destroy your house!" The entire audience cracked up. We laughed it out of our system and moved on happily to the next event. I swear that kid has a future in show business...
Funny, I was exposed to similar bullshit growing up in the communist USSR. All propaganda forced on people was always justified by the most of humane reasons. Do you want to support the oppressed of the world? The starving? The exploited? Of course we were!
It was only later in life you start to notice some fat smirking person sitting in the shadows and enjoying the fruits of that mass enthusiasm... and mass scarifie. Some of the kids I new have noticed the falsehood early on, but decided to play along. Most were clueless and later shocked when the whole communist system collapsed around them. And a rare few had chosen to simply stand for the truth and face the consequences.
"The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models [than to do empirical research]" -- http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
but in this article seems to think that the economists have their models down cold, at least when they support his viewpoint.
Hence, the power of the soundbite.
Freeman Dyson (and others quoted earlier on HN) however wins over the complexity not through unsubstantiated soundbite, but by arguing a simple logical point. CO2 is not a 'pollution' in itself. It's not an alien element on Earth. Plants put all of the carbon through their system 'every 12 years' on average. Plants are not alien. Forest fires and volcanic eruptions can produce carbon, and there is a ready system to 'digest' it. Plants.
That's something of a radical shift in the thinking. All that smoke from burning coal is not pollution???? Hm, taking the thesis to the extreme -- actually no. It's just taking one natural element from the soil and placing it in the atmosphere. Nature does exactly the same thing all the time (forest fires, eruptions etc.).
Obviously, even if we assume that increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is not a disaster, it may still be unpleasant because the change would affect the current status quo. Siberia will become fertile and Arkansas will turn into desert. This change should be prevented or at least managed. But not by the government austerity measures, but by gradual and natural means.
These simple ideas are powerful. They don't require complex arguing over whose weather model is better. Hopefully they will spread.
Of course, this still presents the difficulty of deciding when and where to buy a hundred acres in Siberia to retire on.
I think earth has been terraformed by organisms several times, like there used to be not so much oxygen floating around? But I think the organisms that released the oxygen died after the terraforming. The same could happen to us... Not saying it will, just warning against some sort of Gaia theory that nature will fix everything to our benefit. Nature doesn't really care about us.
When you want to prevent floods, you need to find technologies and techniques that work with the laws of physics, natural systems, and economic forces. If you're going to build below sea level, what is the engineering required to compensate? Does the cost/benefit pan out? Likewise, if you're going to push the climate towards warming, what is the engineering required to compensate? Does the cost/benefit pan out? This is what Freeman Dyson and the authors he is reviewing are asking.
Nature doesn't care about us. But we humans have harnessed nature. Dyson is suggesting that we could do that once again to get us out of the current predicament.
The difference is in the fact that there's been a Carbon Cycle for ages, just like there's been a water cycle for ages. Hydroelectric dams use energy in the water cycle. Gravity driven irrigation canals do as well. The point is that there's already a natural system out there that's capable of capturing huge amounts of carbon.
I think I read recently that the plants that were turned into oil actually are from a time when there was no process in nature yet that could process the bound carbon (similar to plastics today). So it was never part of the natural cycle.
I thought more about the proposed "super-carbon-harbouring trees", but really, how should that work? Any plant that does that would have to be more efficient than existing plants, meaning it would replace the natural plants. Dangerous game to play? (Those genetically engineered plants would definitely replace existing plants, if only because humans would plant massive amounts of them).
Remember that transportation is less than 1/5th of the US's use of petroleum. Since petroleum will be getting more and more scarce, something has to become the new chemical feedstock. Plants are an obvious choice.
Also, bovines are not popular in the CO2 scare-opinions.
Not saying that the trees couldn't work, but so far they don't exist, so they are nothing but a miraculous cure. Thinking about it, their mentioning makes that article lose a lot of authority in my opinion.
Miracle game-changing technologies have been endemic in the history of human civilization. In fact, our current level of population wouldn't even be possible without a bunch of these happening. (From the "Green Revolution" of the 60's back to the development of the plough.)
We really need the carbon in a form that doesn't decompose and is more useful than wood. Diamond would be great...
It would be great if we could design trees that catch more CO2 than they need but, being an evolutionist, I'm not holding my breath. I imagine that even a small energetical efficiency increase would be a big evolutionary advantage and that plants are pretty close to their theoretical efficiency limit.
Of course IANAPNAPP (I Am Not A Physicist, Nor A Plant Physiologist), if you are please enlighten me.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warmi...
It would be a wonderful and improbable coincidence if the net gain in heat from the sun gained by the earth where absolutely perfectly offset by the net loss in heat.
Likewise: Aliens cause global warming. http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwar...
Also, nature is a common good, so if I care about someone else destroying it, it might be less about wanting to spoil his fun, and more about me not wanting him to effectively steal something from me.