Is China or India part of Kyoto? Nope. Why not? Kyoto is just a ploy, and a harmful one at that. Industry has become naturally cleaner over the decades and it will continue to do so, most probably at a faster rate than it has been. There's no reason for hysteria.
Yes, as pointed out, Kyoto would increase the cost of anything with an energy input produced in first world countries and, guess what, production would move to third world countries which didn't sign Kyoto and thus don't have the artificially inflated energy cost. In fact energy will be cheaper for them because of the artificially restricted demand of the first world.
So, CO2 output just shifts, and nothing changes, except for the bad financial effects. Even if Kyoto *did* work, I'm not convinced its effect is even distinguishable from nothing. Is 0.02 degrees less theoretically warming really "better than nothing"? For most purposes it *is* nothing.
[1] You are assuming:
(a) global warming is real
(b) it can be stopped
(c) it should be stopped.
Those are the very points that are in dispute in your previous discussion.
[2] You wrote:
Quote: "If anything the development of new technologies to implement Kyoto will be as much a stimulus to the economy and entrepeneurship as was the introduction of CAFE standards for automobiles - which stimulated the development of hybrids, continously-variable transmissions, and even "clean diesel" engines."
"stimulating the development of hybrids" is not the same thing a stimulating the economy.
Here you are engaging in the "Broken Windows" fallacy of economics. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
If the govt breaks everyones windows, that will be stimulus to the economy of the window industry. But it it will be a net loss to the economy as a whole.
Likewise the CAFE standards were not a stimulus to the economy. They were a stimulus to the development of low-emission autos. But a net loss to the economy as a whole.
Oh, I'm sorry, the projected saving is 0.07 degrees Celcius if everyone meets their Kyoto targets (which they won't). However, I'm quite convinced that much of the data behind that is simply wrong, such as climate sensitivity to CO2. But still, that's practically unmeasurable.
I get the feeling this is like me going up to a doctor and saying "I feel a bit unwell today.. I might have cancer! Give me chemotherapy, quick!". (S)he might reply, "but there's no strong evidence you have cancer, and chemotherapy will make you sick. Can't you wait a few weeks while we do some expensive tests?" And I'll say "No, there's no time, it might spread and I'll die! Plug in the IV, doc!"
Hmmm. Reading your argument that the US is missing an opportunity by not committing to an agreement that will require the US to have invented adequate anti-pollution technologies to avoid an economy-crippling energy cutback, I am saddened that the Wright Brothers did not have the foresight to shut off their engines during their inaugural flight--thereby passing up the opportunity to invent the jet engine and/or the parachute on the way down to extract them from their plight and thereby hurdle the avionics technological curve ahead by decades--shame on you, Orville and Wilbur!
don't be a douche. no country that signs on to koyoto is expected to immediately meet the standards instantaneously.
and the point about koyoto ruining the u.s. economy because india and china don't sign on is a straw man. the point is that we are looking for more efficient AND cheaper energy consumption. eventually technologies will be invented that will make complying with koyoto cheaper than not.
and anyone who says industry gets naturally cleaner on its own hasn't been paying any attention to automotive fuel economy, which more or less hugs the government required minimum.
and the point about koyoto ruining the u.s. economy because india and china don't sign on is a straw man. the point is that we are looking for more efficient AND cheaper energy consumption. eventually technologies will be invented that will make complying with koyoto cheaper than not.
No. The point is that these technologies will be invented any way in the natural course of industry. Why? Because that's the way it works. That's exactly what has been happening since the Industrial Revolution began.
Why?
Because efficient (i.e. cleaner) energy consumtion costs less and that means a better profit for all involved. The early industrial world was a pollution-ridden hellhole in many places but technology advanced and now we're in a much, much, much better place. Why throw in some b.s. treaty to gum up the works?
It's ridiculous to tie down the U.S.'s economy when China and India are soon to become pollution powerhouses.
...and anyone who says industry gets naturally cleaner on its own hasn't been paying any attention to automotive fuel economy, which more or less hugs the government required minimum.
We're not talking about fuel economy — which, by the way, absolutely doesn't hug the minimum. Especially nowadays when fuel efficient cars are in such high demand. That isn't going to go away any time soon.
The problem is this: People of your "ilk" are being worked up into hysterics when there is absolutely no reason for it. Over the past decades we've vastly improved the health of our ecosphere. Proof? Fine.
I live in Los Angeles. We have smog. I've only been here for about a year and a half, but I've talked to various people who have lived here all their lives. One thing that's constant between all these people is that if I complain about the hazy horizon they say something like, "Oh, well you should have been here in the 70's and 80's. Smog so thick you could cut it with a knife."
Naturally, I thought they were full of it. So I looked up some facts. From the wikipedia article on L.A.:
The number of Stage 1 smog alerts has declined from over 100 per year in the 1970s to almost zero in the new millennium.
Improvement is coming naturally as part of a better business model. Stuff trying to suffocate the thing that will save us.
People with an agenda consistently ignore the harm their utopian schemes do. A few years ago, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the downsizing of cars in the 1970s and 1980s, partly as a result of the CAFE standards, resulted in an estimated 1300 to 2600 additional traffic fatalities in 1993 alone. I shudder to think how many people have suffer devastating injuries as well.
The burdens of change fall unequally, as the dead and injured have experienced. Who will come to the aid of the Americans whose lives would be ruined by Kyoto compliance? Certainly not the self-congratulatory activists.
My favorite quotation:
"Half the harm that is done in this world is due
to people who want to feel important. They don't
mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest
them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it
because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
to think well of themselves."
I am sure all of you are correct in your arguments.
Nonetheless, the ice caps over the Arctic ocean, Greenland and Antarctica obviously are shrinking. Unless they are evaporating, they melting and, consequently, ocean levels are rising. I understand the rise in sea levels shall reach approximately one meter by the end of this century. Perhaps the time has come to think about the full implications of this.
Signing onto an international treaty such as the one annunciated at Kyoto probably shall have little effect on global warming. And in any case, India and China both will ignore the treaty regardless of what the United States does. In addition, evidence of the cause of the heat that would be causing the ice caps to melt now seems contradictory.
But what I am saying is that there is nothing at all contradictory in the evidence that the ice caps are shrinking and that the ocean levels are rising. Ignore all this your peril.
The Earth has always had a very dynamic climate. It's insanity to believe we should try and force it to stay where it is when that's completely opposite to what it naturally wants to do. If the poles are going to shrink some than let them. We'll adapt, just like we always do. And then 500 years from now people will be bitching about "global cooling" and how that will kill us all because the ice caps are expanding.
JH, what you say about Earth's historically dynamic climate is true. But you neglect to consider that the rise and fall of sea level as related to shrinkage and expansion of the world's large ice formations have likelihood of causing monumentally disastrous social, economic and society-wide chaos.
Such disasters will be of even greater magnitude if the melting of these glaciers is accelerated because of even greater rises in world temperatures, due to interaction among a number of meteorological factors.
The world population is now more than twice as large as it was in 1934, the year of my birth. As a growing percentage of that world population is concentrated along coastal strips that themselves are barely above sea level. In this situation, there is potential for scores or hundreds of millions of persons to be forced off their sea-level or near sea-level habitat. Migrations on such a scale will be panic-driven, largely uncontrolled, and mostly uncontrolable.
If, and more probably when, any large-scale population movements fleeing the world's near sea level coastlines are triggered by such meteorological and geological factors described above, initial politial pressures will be put upon governments of the more advanced countries to save the refugees threatened by drowing, starvation and other perils. But no such can do anything to control or reverse near-term changes in sea level.
And many of these advanced countries themselves shall have armied of refugees from their own coastal areas to deal with. In the end, armies will be organized mainly for the purpose of driving off these refugees, or even killing them. And make no mistake in this; mass murder has previously been used by otherwise-orderly societies as means of population control, and this will happen again as the perceived need arises.
In any case, if there are enough refugees and no solutions in hand, all the economies of all the organized govrnments will be bankrupted by irreparable societal problems associated with what will be the largest and most massive folkerwanderung in human history.
Let the US experience with hurricane Katrina last year serve as a fractionally small sample of what could be coming. Then do the math on how many millions -- or perhaps billions -- of persons live and work within how many inches or centimeters of sea level; and how many of these will be on the move when the waters that rise around them never recede in their lifetimes.
First of all, there ain't a damn thing we can do about it. Kyoto isn't going to get it done, and there's no way larger treaties are going to be implemented. But your scenario of disaster is pretty ridiculous. It assume we would do nothing while this danger approaches.
Ever hear of the Netherlands? A huge portion of that nation is, of course, under sea level. Thanks now to their Delta project they have suffered very little (if any) flooding. As resourceful Americans I imagine a very similar project could be implemented.
JH, what happened to New Orleans last year was pretty well predicted by a not-insignificant group of scientists, but all the local power structure laughed off the predictions as premature, unsubstantiated, and, ridiculous.
I understand there have been great variations in sea levels over prehistoric and historic times, and that much of these variations have been caused by periodic ice ages. In any case, there were few if any social effects, because large worldwide populations are a relatively new historical phenomenon.
But the US Environmental Protection Agency projects a probable rise of world sea levels to a probable 24 inches during this century, probably related to an expected increase in ambient temperatures. This certainly means the frequency and ferocity of tropical oceanic storms shall increase as well.
The construction of the famed polders along the North sea coast of the Netherlands is commendable. But if sea levels continue to rise significantly, no system of dikes can be guaranteed to hold back the oceans from any strip of land so protected. Depending on such contrivances is akin to massive drowning of large populations.
And some threatened land areas are more or less beyond saving. The latest information available is that the lower Mississippi river delta, large parts of New Orleans, and the southwestern Mississippi gulf coast area are all sliding into the gulf of Mexico. So what we have there is at best an american Venice, and at worst an american Atlantis.
And more is to come. Much of southern Florida shall be at or below sea level by the end of this century. Much the same is probably true for numerous other of our coastal lands along the Atlantic ocean and the gulf of Mexico.
In all these cases, there will be much talk, sporadic and mostly useless attempts at action, and the oceans shall continue to rise.
As for the affected populations along all these coasts, there shall be promises which shall come to nothing, for reasons of which we both are aware.
I live some 1200 ft above sea level, JH. Where do you live in relation to the nearest sea coast?
I live in Los Angeles, so not very far at all. But I'm not a reactionary and I'm also humble enough to realize that if the seas are rising than they will rise, and there isn't a good God damn that we as humans can do about it except build dykes.
Now, if it reduced global warming by half, I would probably agree, but I've never understood how reducing ANY problem by about 2% can be confidently assumed to be a "key" step. When someone comes up with a realistic plan to deal with the other 98% of global warming, I'll recognize it as a "key first step".
And if the ocean rises by 24 inches over 100 years, that is plenty of time to gradually move people slightly inland.
So, CO2 output just shifts, and nothing changes, except for the bad financial effects. Even if Kyoto *did* work, I'm not convinced its effect is even distinguishable from nothing. Is 0.02 degrees less theoretically warming really "better than nothing"? For most purposes it *is* nothing.
[1] You are assuming:
(a) global warming is real
(b) it can be stopped
(c) it should be stopped.
Those are the very points that are in dispute in your previous discussion.
[2] You wrote:
Quote: "If anything the development of new technologies to implement Kyoto will be as much a stimulus to the economy and entrepeneurship as was the introduction of CAFE standards for automobiles - which stimulated the development of hybrids, continously-variable transmissions, and even "clean diesel" engines."
"stimulating the development of hybrids" is not the same thing a stimulating the economy.
Here you are engaging in the "Broken Windows" fallacy of economics. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
If the govt breaks everyones windows, that will be stimulus to the economy of the window industry. But it it will be a net loss to the economy as a whole.
Likewise the CAFE standards were not a stimulus to the economy. They were a stimulus to the development of low-emission autos. But a net loss to the economy as a whole.
I get the feeling this is like me going up to a doctor and saying "I feel a bit unwell today.. I might have cancer! Give me chemotherapy, quick!". (S)he might reply, "but there's no strong evidence you have cancer, and chemotherapy will make you sick. Can't you wait a few weeks while we do some expensive tests?" And I'll say "No, there's no time, it might spread and I'll die! Plug in the IV, doc!"
*sigh*
Why Kyoto's hard
Three Questions
Greener than Thou?
don't be a douche. no country that signs on to koyoto is expected to immediately meet the standards instantaneously.
and the point about koyoto ruining the u.s. economy because india and china don't sign on is a straw man. the point is that we are looking for more efficient AND cheaper energy consumption. eventually technologies will be invented that will make complying with koyoto cheaper than not.
and anyone who says industry gets naturally cleaner on its own hasn't been paying any attention to automotive fuel economy, which more or less hugs the government required minimum.
No. The point is that these technologies will be invented any way in the natural course of industry. Why? Because that's the way it works. That's exactly what has been happening since the Industrial Revolution began.
Why?
Because efficient (i.e. cleaner) energy consumtion costs less and that means a better profit for all involved. The early industrial world was a pollution-ridden hellhole in many places but technology advanced and now we're in a much, much, much better place. Why throw in some b.s. treaty to gum up the works?
It's ridiculous to tie down the U.S.'s economy when China and India are soon to become pollution powerhouses.
We're not talking about fuel economy — which, by the way, absolutely doesn't hug the minimum. Especially nowadays when fuel efficient cars are in such high demand. That isn't going to go away any time soon.
The problem is this: People of your "ilk" are being worked up into hysterics when there is absolutely no reason for it. Over the past decades we've vastly improved the health of our ecosphere. Proof? Fine.
I live in Los Angeles. We have smog. I've only been here for about a year and a half, but I've talked to various people who have lived here all their lives. One thing that's constant between all these people is that if I complain about the hazy horizon they say something like, "Oh, well you should have been here in the 70's and 80's. Smog so thick you could cut it with a knife."
Naturally, I thought they were full of it. So I looked up some facts. From the wikipedia article on L.A.:
Improvement is coming naturally as part of a better business model. Stuff trying to suffocate the thing that will save us.
Traffic Fatalities
The burdens of change fall unequally, as the dead and injured have experienced. Who will come to the aid of the Americans whose lives would be ruined by Kyoto compliance? Certainly not the self-congratulatory activists.
My favorite quotation:
"Half the harm that is done in this world is due
to people who want to feel important. They don't
mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest
them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it
because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
to think well of themselves."
-- T.S. Eliot, 1950
Nonetheless, the ice caps over the Arctic ocean, Greenland and Antarctica obviously are shrinking. Unless they are evaporating, they melting and, consequently, ocean levels are rising. I understand the rise in sea levels shall reach approximately one meter by the end of this century. Perhaps the time has come to think about the full implications of this.
Signing onto an international treaty such as the one annunciated at Kyoto probably shall have little effect on global warming. And in any case, India and China both will ignore the treaty regardless of what the United States does. In addition, evidence of the cause of the heat that would be causing the ice caps to melt now seems contradictory.
But what I am saying is that there is nothing at all contradictory in the evidence that the ice caps are shrinking and that the ocean levels are rising. Ignore all this your peril.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The Earth has always had a very dynamic climate. It's insanity to believe we should try and force it to stay where it is when that's completely opposite to what it naturally wants to do. If the poles are going to shrink some than let them. We'll adapt, just like we always do. And then 500 years from now people will be bitching about "global cooling" and how that will kill us all because the ice caps are expanding.
Such disasters will be of even greater magnitude if the melting of these glaciers is accelerated because of even greater rises in world temperatures, due to interaction among a number of meteorological factors.
The world population is now more than twice as large as it was in 1934, the year of my birth. As a growing percentage of that world population is concentrated along coastal strips that themselves are barely above sea level. In this situation, there is potential for scores or hundreds of millions of persons to be forced off their sea-level or near sea-level habitat. Migrations on such a scale will be panic-driven, largely uncontrolled, and mostly uncontrolable.
If, and more probably when, any large-scale population movements fleeing the world's near sea level coastlines are triggered by such meteorological and geological factors described above, initial politial pressures will be put upon governments of the more advanced countries to save the refugees threatened by drowing, starvation and other perils. But no such can do anything to control or reverse near-term changes in sea level.
And many of these advanced countries themselves shall have armied of refugees from their own coastal areas to deal with. In the end, armies will be organized mainly for the purpose of driving off these refugees, or even killing them. And make no mistake in this; mass murder has previously been used by otherwise-orderly societies as means of population control, and this will happen again as the perceived need arises.
In any case, if there are enough refugees and no solutions in hand, all the economies of all the organized govrnments will be bankrupted by irreparable societal problems associated with what will be the largest and most massive folkerwanderung in human history.
Let the US experience with hurricane Katrina last year serve as a fractionally small sample of what could be coming. Then do the math on how many millions -- or perhaps billions -- of persons live and work within how many inches or centimeters of sea level; and how many of these will be on the move when the waters that rise around them never recede in their lifetimes.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
First of all, there ain't a damn thing we can do about it. Kyoto isn't going to get it done, and there's no way larger treaties are going to be implemented. But your scenario of disaster is pretty ridiculous. It assume we would do nothing while this danger approaches.
Ever hear of the Netherlands? A huge portion of that nation is, of course, under sea level. Thanks now to their Delta project they have suffered very little (if any) flooding. As resourceful Americans I imagine a very similar project could be implemented.
I understand there have been great variations in sea levels over prehistoric and historic times, and that much of these variations have been caused by periodic ice ages. In any case, there were few if any social effects, because large worldwide populations are a relatively new historical phenomenon.
But the US Environmental Protection Agency projects a probable rise of world sea levels to a probable 24 inches during this century, probably related to an expected increase in ambient temperatures. This certainly means the frequency and ferocity of tropical oceanic storms shall increase as well.
The construction of the famed polders along the North sea coast of the Netherlands is commendable. But if sea levels continue to rise significantly, no system of dikes can be guaranteed to hold back the oceans from any strip of land so protected. Depending on such contrivances is akin to massive drowning of large populations.
And some threatened land areas are more or less beyond saving. The latest information available is that the lower Mississippi river delta, large parts of New Orleans, and the southwestern Mississippi gulf coast area are all sliding into the gulf of Mexico. So what we have there is at best an american Venice, and at worst an american Atlantis.
And more is to come. Much of southern Florida shall be at or below sea level by the end of this century. Much the same is probably true for numerous other of our coastal lands along the Atlantic ocean and the gulf of Mexico.
In all these cases, there will be much talk, sporadic and mostly useless attempts at action, and the oceans shall continue to rise.
As for the affected populations along all these coasts, there shall be promises which shall come to nothing, for reasons of which we both are aware.
I live some 1200 ft above sea level, JH. Where do you live in relation to the nearest sea coast?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Now, if it reduced global warming by half, I would probably agree, but I've never understood how reducing ANY problem by about 2% can be confidently assumed to be a "key" step. When someone comes up with a realistic plan to deal with the other 98% of global warming, I'll recognize it as a "key first step".
And if the ocean rises by 24 inches over 100 years, that is plenty of time to gradually move people slightly inland.