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Nothing can be done!
Jul. 5th, 2006 10:45 amRobert J. Samuelson takes the next step in slagging-on-Al-Gore technology and tells us that, while global warming may be real, nothing can or should be done about it until some vague futurity after "major technological breakthroughs". He sets up a dichotomy between global warming as "moral crusade" or as "engineering problem", and complains that people talking about the problem are keeping us from fixing it by emphasizing the former.
He has a part of a valid point in there but he's too busy strawman-flogging to analyze it properly. Human behavior is indeed more likely to change if, through policy changes or otherwise, it becomes a matter of immediate self-interest rather than of greater moral perfection. There's a strain of environmentalism that has a history of disparaging technological solutions to problems as "quick engineering fixes" to things better addressed by radical transformation of society and fundamental improvements in human behavior, which are somehow regarded as both feasible and less potentially damaging to attempt. But while I admit I haven't seen his movie, I've never seen any evidence that Al Gore is in that camp. For all his schoolmarmish reputation, the man's a technophile and always has been.
It's a false dichotomy, and the choice between doing nothing and radically reshaping global civilization is also a false dichotomy. Samuelson is absolutely right that this is tough; and I also think he's absolutely right that we can't, today, abandon economic growth. But if better technologies exist, countries like India and China might be able to adopt them. If someday it turns out that geo-engineering of the type Samuelson briefly mentions can be managed without being a cure worse than the disease, we'll probably want to use it—but it's just a temporary stopgap if carbon emissions keep on exploding. People may have to adopt nuclear energy to a greater degree if it can be done productively and with acceptable safety. It might be good to encourage patterns of land use along something other than North American lines; as far as I can tell, American-style commercial-residential sprawl isn't absolutely necessary for economic growth. None of these avenues of attack precludes any other, and we may well need them all.
I doubt that it's going to be possible to keep carbon emissions below the level required to prevent any major harmful consequences; indeed, it's possible that we're already seeing harmful consequences. But this isn't a matter of an all-or-nothing threshold either. Personally, I think that while it's good to speak of goals, some of the media talk of this or that level of CO2 emission as a catastrophic "tipping point" is damaging; it makes it sound as if all mitigation efforts are worthless beyond some threshold of doom, which as far as I know is not true. There are worries about positive feedbacks like methane hydrates, but it's not as if, once CO2 levels get beyond a certain point, the Earth is fated to become a second Venus (according to climate models, such a "runaway greenhouse" threshold exists but is so enormous that we'd have a lot of other things to worry about between here and there).
Reductions in the emission rate will always help in the long term. Even if things have gotten really bad, continuing to emit carbon dioxide at a growing rate will make them even worse. Even if emission levels continue to rise in the short term, we're better off than if they rise more rapidly. There is no point at which it makes sense to say, "oh, well, we've screwed the pooch, and we might as well enjoy the last days until doomsday."
Nor is it likely that we'll carry out aggressive research programs into technologies for reducing carbon emission—or even for adapting to the warming that we can't stop—if we believe there is no problem. Samuelson completely ignores the fact that part of what Gore is fighting is an organized industrial-political campaign to convince people that manmade global warming does not even exist, in the face of great and gathering evidence and overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary. I've said it before: the long-term effects of global warming scare me less than the long-term effects of having leaders who think they can ignore or re-mold at will the picture of the world provided by science.
Update: Just in time for my digression, Gavin of RealClimate posts a good article about "tipping points" and what they mean.
He has a part of a valid point in there but he's too busy strawman-flogging to analyze it properly. Human behavior is indeed more likely to change if, through policy changes or otherwise, it becomes a matter of immediate self-interest rather than of greater moral perfection. There's a strain of environmentalism that has a history of disparaging technological solutions to problems as "quick engineering fixes" to things better addressed by radical transformation of society and fundamental improvements in human behavior, which are somehow regarded as both feasible and less potentially damaging to attempt. But while I admit I haven't seen his movie, I've never seen any evidence that Al Gore is in that camp. For all his schoolmarmish reputation, the man's a technophile and always has been.
It's a false dichotomy, and the choice between doing nothing and radically reshaping global civilization is also a false dichotomy. Samuelson is absolutely right that this is tough; and I also think he's absolutely right that we can't, today, abandon economic growth. But if better technologies exist, countries like India and China might be able to adopt them. If someday it turns out that geo-engineering of the type Samuelson briefly mentions can be managed without being a cure worse than the disease, we'll probably want to use it—but it's just a temporary stopgap if carbon emissions keep on exploding. People may have to adopt nuclear energy to a greater degree if it can be done productively and with acceptable safety. It might be good to encourage patterns of land use along something other than North American lines; as far as I can tell, American-style commercial-residential sprawl isn't absolutely necessary for economic growth. None of these avenues of attack precludes any other, and we may well need them all.
I doubt that it's going to be possible to keep carbon emissions below the level required to prevent any major harmful consequences; indeed, it's possible that we're already seeing harmful consequences. But this isn't a matter of an all-or-nothing threshold either. Personally, I think that while it's good to speak of goals, some of the media talk of this or that level of CO2 emission as a catastrophic "tipping point" is damaging; it makes it sound as if all mitigation efforts are worthless beyond some threshold of doom, which as far as I know is not true. There are worries about positive feedbacks like methane hydrates, but it's not as if, once CO2 levels get beyond a certain point, the Earth is fated to become a second Venus (according to climate models, such a "runaway greenhouse" threshold exists but is so enormous that we'd have a lot of other things to worry about between here and there).
Reductions in the emission rate will always help in the long term. Even if things have gotten really bad, continuing to emit carbon dioxide at a growing rate will make them even worse. Even if emission levels continue to rise in the short term, we're better off than if they rise more rapidly. There is no point at which it makes sense to say, "oh, well, we've screwed the pooch, and we might as well enjoy the last days until doomsday."
Nor is it likely that we'll carry out aggressive research programs into technologies for reducing carbon emission—or even for adapting to the warming that we can't stop—if we believe there is no problem. Samuelson completely ignores the fact that part of what Gore is fighting is an organized industrial-political campaign to convince people that manmade global warming does not even exist, in the face of great and gathering evidence and overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary. I've said it before: the long-term effects of global warming scare me less than the long-term effects of having leaders who think they can ignore or re-mold at will the picture of the world provided by science.
Update: Just in time for my digression, Gavin of RealClimate posts a good article about "tipping points" and what they mean.