A lot of good things might happen too—avoiding reglaciation, greening the world’s deserts and taking the planet out of the freezer being among them.
One cannot just look at the negative things—one must keep a balance sheet, and see how the positive and negative aspects add up.
Trying to stay where we are appears to be a particularly stupid and risky option—due to the likelihood of catastrophic reglaciation. To have a reasonable safety margin, we must try to heat the planet up. IMO, the issue is not whether to do it, but rather how much—and how fast.
One cannot just look at the negative things—one must keep a balance sheet, and see how the positive and negative aspects add up.
Yeah but this really isn’t a difficult calculation. Yeah, you might green a desert or two to make up for some of the farm land that gets ruined but you’ll have no infrastructure set up to take advantage of it. It will cost you hundreds of billions of dollars while people starve. Human civilization has adapted to the planet in a particular way and there will always be high costs associated with rapid change to the planet that humans can’t easily adjust to. If we had built our cities knowing that the climate was going to change rapidly that would be one thing, the costs would be minimized.
Also, I think we can hold off worrying about the next glacial period until we’re considerably more than 12,000 years in to it.
Maybe we’re thinking at different scopes. Each unit of that graph represents 10,000 years. Messing with the climate now risks expensive disasters that stall economic and technological development over the next 500 years. Unless you think a glacier is going to be crushing New York City between now and then the best thing to do is develop as much as possible and learn things until you can confidently hack the climate.
Global warming is benign, though. The changes are generally positive. The idea of warming causing an expensive disaster that stalls economic and technological development is a fearmongering fantasy—and is not supported by science. The faster warming happens, the more quickly the Earth’s carrying capacity will go up, the more food we will be able to grow, the faster the deserts, arid regions and icy-wastelands will vanish, and the more minds and resources we will have to dedicate to our real problems.
Those who want to stop warming appear to have identified technological development as the cause of the problem in the first place—and seem to be doing what they can to sabotage development—by restricting the access to resources by businesses—thereby attempting to cut off their air supply. My assessment is that such behaviour is likely to have a destructive effect that increases the planet’s risk of reglaciation.
In the long run, they may be positive. In the short run, melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets means that most of Manhattan Island, most of Florida, and plenty of other very valuable developed land will end up underwater. The cost of relocating the inhabitants and rebuilding the infrastructure would be enormous, easily reaching into the trillions of dollars. Might as well drop a hydrogen bomb on New York City!
ETA: The “hydrogen bomb” comment was stupid and gratuitous. I blame sleep deprivation.
Well thats of course not right. The primary loss in dropping an H-bomb on NYC is the loss of human life—both in a moral and an economic sense.
Here is a point to consider. Over the last 100 years the population of the earth has increased by 5 billion. We have created new places for all of those people to live and work. And that was done with a population much smaller than we have today.
Over the next 100 years we may add 3 billion more and we will need place for those people to live and work.
Its not immediately clear that the costs of building all of this in a new location is that huge relatively speaking.
The faster warming happens … the faster the deserts, arid regions and icy-wastelands will vanish
Ok, icy wastelands I can see. But the deserts and arid regions? Our deserts here in Australia seem to have more than enough heat already. And the most fertile land is that which is right near the coast, ready to be covered in salty water as the ice melts. Then all we would have left is desert.
According to Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, Australia’s biggest agriculture problem is a lack of good topsoil; you really can’t farm it very well because if you don’t return the nutrients from the plants to the soil by not harvesting, you end up unable to grow much of anything at all a year later.
Deserts are mostly an ice-age phenomenon. The positive effects of increased evaporation and precipitation eventually dominate as temperatures rise. Check with the humidity rises in northern Australia to see the effect—or see:
Regardless of whether the ultimate effects of global warming are a net positive or negative, there are likely to be costly disruptions, as areas currently good for agriculture and/or habitation cease to be good for them, even if they’re replaced by other areas.
I’m sure we can both produce a long list of positive and negative effects of global warming. Picking out items from the “negative” list does not constitute much of an argument—you have to look at the big picture.
Greenland and Antarctica have enormous inertia. Ice takes a long time to melt—and antarctic ice is an average of 2 kilometres thick—it will probably take tens of thousands of years to melt it. So change is unlikely to be particularly rapid.
I am not advocating particulaly rapid change. Extended change may well be even more inconvenient, of course. It is quite possible that we should try and get climate change over with as soon as possible—to avoid lengthy disruptive changes.
A warmer planet will have more and better farming opportunities, and will sustainably support more people. It is the arid ice-age climate with its deserts and permafrost that is hostile to living systems. Today we have to construct greenhouses artificially to grow plants for food. If we can just end this horrifying ice ige, the whole planet will become our greenhouse.
I think we can hold off worrying about the next glacial period until we’re considerably more than 12,000 years in to it.
There is no good reason to think that. The last few interglaicials were only around 10,000 years long. The end of this one may well be overdue.
You’re talking about things that a civilization considerably more advanced than ours should strongly consider. But we don’t even know how to heat the planet without nasty externalities. Right now human civilization is in the “don’t fuck it up” stage. You don’t go messing with the climate until you know what you’re doing or you have to take the chance just to survive.
No. The important thing is to get away from the cliff edge that represents reglaciation. That is the catastrophe which we most urgently need to avoid. Staying near to the edge of the “reglaciation” cliff is a really bad option for humanity and the rest of the planet. That way, potentially billions may die in a reglaciation catastrophe. Safety considerations are one of the main reasons for wanting to further warm the planet up.
We should not hang around on the edge of the “reglaciation” cliff, waiting for technology to develop. Nor should we engage in ridiculous schemes intended to cool the planet down. We should just walk away from the cliff—and probably go as quickly as conveniently possible before the ground crumbles beneath our feet. The longer we dilly-dally around, the bigger our chances of going over the edge.
This does not seem very complicated to me. Reglaciation looms as a clear and present danger. We must do our very best to go in the opposite direction. We can debate how fast we can safely run, how far away is a safe distance, etc—but run we absoultely must.
The Milankovic forcing is small. Even in the unforced case we would probably miss the next trigger and have 50 Ka of peace and quiet. Now we’re well past the threshhold. Find something else to worry about, please, like ocean acidification, coastal flooding, rapid regional climate shifts, and ecosystem disruption for instance.
If it becomes an imminent threat, reglaciation may be easier to avert than warming. Right now, we know more about how to heat the planet than how to cool it off.
Reglaciation is an imminent threat—and we don’t know if we would be able to stop it.
A lot of the misguided research on mitigating global warming has investigated how to cool the planet down. I know of no research effort on a similar scale devoted to heating the planet up. So, I am not clear about where the idea that we know more about how to heat the planet than we do about how to cool it is coming from.
Hopefully in due course we will have fusion and mirrors in space on our side as well.
I don’t think anyone knows if a concerted effort could prevent reglaciation, though. If anyone wants to make the case that we should downplay the risk of reglaciation because we could avert it, I would say: prove it. This looks potentially extremely dangerous to the planet to me: show me that it is not.
Until we are much more confident in our climate control abilities, I think a safe distance is prudent. IMO, that involves at least melting Greenland.
You make a valid point, but you neglect to mention that the same temperature/pressure regimes that generate ice crystals also make metals (especially scrap metal alloys) very brittle and prone to cracking, not to mention long-term effects on malleability.
You have a point there. If you want to build something out of metal and not have it break—and there are lots of important things that can be made out of metal—a cold environment makes it harder.
That was what we thought ten years ago. There has been considerable and surprising progress on ice sheet dynamics. Basically, ice sheets do not melt from the top. They crack, fail mechanically, and slip into the sea. This is especially true of those whose base is below sea level, specifically the West Antarctic Ice sheet (WAIS).
14 Ka ago sea level rose by several meters per century for several centuries. The mechanism was the partial failure of the WAIS. There’s still some left.
Don’t get me wrong; this will not happen next week, and there will be no resulting tsunami. But a meter of sea level rise in this century is likely, two is plausible, and four isn’t totally excluded.
You seem fond of don’t-worry arguments. This makes you an instance of Eliezer’s point.
You sound as though you are arguing with something in my post—but it is not clear what—since you don’t really present much of a counter-argument. Greenland and Antarctica really do have enormous thermal inertia. Ice really does take a long time to melt—and Antarctic ice really is an average of 2 kilometres thick.
You are arguing with the “it will probably take tens of thousands of years to melt it”? Consider that a ballpark figure. Currently the Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker and thicker—and it is −37 degrees C down around the pole. So: it is not going anywhere anytime soon.
You seem fond of don’t-worry arguments.
Perhaps paranoia has its place—but I think it is best recognised as such.
Those who make calls to action often distort the picture—to make their cause seem more urgent.
So: such causes become surrounded with distortions and misinformation designed to manipulate others.
Global average sea level rose at an average rate of around 1.8 mm per year over 1961 to 2003 and at an average rate of about 3.1 mm per year from 1993 to 2003.
That seems pretty slow to me.
It is true that the record—at the peak of the last glacial retreat—was some 65mm / year—but there was a lot more ice all over Russia and Canada back then—and we are unlikely to see anything like that with today’s much-smaller ice caps.
Well, a lot of bad things might happen.
A lot of good things might happen too—avoiding reglaciation, greening the world’s deserts and taking the planet out of the freezer being among them.
One cannot just look at the negative things—one must keep a balance sheet, and see how the positive and negative aspects add up.
Trying to stay where we are appears to be a particularly stupid and risky option—due to the likelihood of catastrophic reglaciation. To have a reasonable safety margin, we must try to heat the planet up. IMO, the issue is not whether to do it, but rather how much—and how fast.
Yeah but this really isn’t a difficult calculation. Yeah, you might green a desert or two to make up for some of the farm land that gets ruined but you’ll have no infrastructure set up to take advantage of it. It will cost you hundreds of billions of dollars while people starve. Human civilization has adapted to the planet in a particular way and there will always be high costs associated with rapid change to the planet that humans can’t easily adjust to. If we had built our cities knowing that the climate was going to change rapidly that would be one thing, the costs would be minimized.
Also, I think we can hold off worrying about the next glacial period until we’re considerably more than 12,000 years in to it.
Re: “Also, I think we can hold off worrying about the next glacial period until we’re considerably more than 12,000 years in to it.”
You are kidding, right? Interglacials don’t last for long. The next glaicial period is probably overdue:
http://www.fcpp.org/images/publications/ME036%20Graph%201.jpg
...once the planet gets into ice-driven positive feedback cycle that reglaciation represents, stopping it may prove challenging.
Maybe we’re thinking at different scopes. Each unit of that graph represents 10,000 years. Messing with the climate now risks expensive disasters that stall economic and technological development over the next 500 years. Unless you think a glacier is going to be crushing New York City between now and then the best thing to do is develop as much as possible and learn things until you can confidently hack the climate.
Global warming is benign, though. The changes are generally positive. The idea of warming causing an expensive disaster that stalls economic and technological development is a fearmongering fantasy—and is not supported by science. The faster warming happens, the more quickly the Earth’s carrying capacity will go up, the more food we will be able to grow, the faster the deserts, arid regions and icy-wastelands will vanish, and the more minds and resources we will have to dedicate to our real problems.
Those who want to stop warming appear to have identified technological development as the cause of the problem in the first place—and seem to be doing what they can to sabotage development—by restricting the access to resources by businesses—thereby attempting to cut off their air supply. My assessment is that such behaviour is likely to have a destructive effect that increases the planet’s risk of reglaciation.
In the long run, they may be positive. In the short run, melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets means that most of Manhattan Island, most of Florida, and plenty of other very valuable developed land will end up underwater. The cost of relocating the inhabitants and rebuilding the infrastructure would be enormous, easily reaching into the trillions of dollars. Might as well drop a hydrogen bomb on New York City!
ETA: The “hydrogen bomb” comment was stupid and gratuitous. I blame sleep deprivation.
Well thats of course not right. The primary loss in dropping an H-bomb on NYC is the loss of human life—both in a moral and an economic sense.
Here is a point to consider. Over the last 100 years the population of the earth has increased by 5 billion. We have created new places for all of those people to live and work. And that was done with a population much smaller than we have today. Over the next 100 years we may add 3 billion more and we will need place for those people to live and work.
Its not immediately clear that the costs of building all of this in a new location is that huge relatively speaking.
That would be a special sort of hydrogen bomb that expands by 3mm per year, I presume.
Okay, bad metaphor.
::sigh::
That’s what I get for commenting when sleep deprived. :(
Ok, icy wastelands I can see. But the deserts and arid regions? Our deserts here in Australia seem to have more than enough heat already. And the most fertile land is that which is right near the coast, ready to be covered in salty water as the ice melts. Then all we would have left is desert.
According to Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, Australia’s biggest agriculture problem is a lack of good topsoil; you really can’t farm it very well because if you don’t return the nutrients from the plants to the soil by not harvesting, you end up unable to grow much of anything at all a year later.
Deserts are mostly an ice-age phenomenon. The positive effects of increased evaporation and precipitation eventually dominate as temperatures rise. Check with the humidity rises in northern Australia to see the effect—or see:
“Sahara desert goes green, thanks to warming”
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/Sahara-desert-goes-green-thanks-to-warming/articleshow/4849759.cms
Increased precipitation may also mean more hurricanes and other destructive storms. :(
Regardless of whether the ultimate effects of global warming are a net positive or negative, there are likely to be costly disruptions, as areas currently good for agriculture and/or habitation cease to be good for them, even if they’re replaced by other areas.
Exactly.
I’m sure we can both produce a long list of positive and negative effects of global warming. Picking out items from the “negative” list does not constitute much of an argument—you have to look at the big picture.
Greenland and Antarctica have enormous inertia. Ice takes a long time to melt—and antarctic ice is an average of 2 kilometres thick—it will probably take tens of thousands of years to melt it. So change is unlikely to be particularly rapid.
I am not advocating particulaly rapid change. Extended change may well be even more inconvenient, of course. It is quite possible that we should try and get climate change over with as soon as possible—to avoid lengthy disruptive changes.
A warmer planet will have more and better farming opportunities, and will sustainably support more people. It is the arid ice-age climate with its deserts and permafrost that is hostile to living systems. Today we have to construct greenhouses artificially to grow plants for food. If we can just end this horrifying ice ige, the whole planet will become our greenhouse.
There is no good reason to think that. The last few interglaicials were only around 10,000 years long. The end of this one may well be overdue.
You’re talking about things that a civilization considerably more advanced than ours should strongly consider. But we don’t even know how to heat the planet without nasty externalities. Right now human civilization is in the “don’t fuck it up” stage. You don’t go messing with the climate until you know what you’re doing or you have to take the chance just to survive.
No. The important thing is to get away from the cliff edge that represents reglaciation. That is the catastrophe which we most urgently need to avoid. Staying near to the edge of the “reglaciation” cliff is a really bad option for humanity and the rest of the planet. That way, potentially billions may die in a reglaciation catastrophe. Safety considerations are one of the main reasons for wanting to further warm the planet up.
We should not hang around on the edge of the “reglaciation” cliff, waiting for technology to develop. Nor should we engage in ridiculous schemes intended to cool the planet down. We should just walk away from the cliff—and probably go as quickly as conveniently possible before the ground crumbles beneath our feet. The longer we dilly-dally around, the bigger our chances of going over the edge.
This does not seem very complicated to me. Reglaciation looms as a clear and present danger. We must do our very best to go in the opposite direction. We can debate how fast we can safely run, how far away is a safe distance, etc—but run we absoultely must.
The Milankovic forcing is small. Even in the unforced case we would probably miss the next trigger and have 50 Ka of peace and quiet. Now we’re well past the threshhold. Find something else to worry about, please, like ocean acidification, coastal flooding, rapid regional climate shifts, and ecosystem disruption for instance.
You are assuming that Milankovitch cycles are the cause of the problem?
That is debated—due to things like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000-year_problem
...and the list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Problems
See also some of the alternative hypotheses:
“Sun’s fickle heart may leave us cold”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325884.500-suns-fickle-heart-may-leave-us-cold.html
...and...
“A New Theory of Glacial Cycles”
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/glacialmain.htm
Unreferenced claims that “we are well past the threshold” don’t count as particularly useful evidence.
I recommend you back up such material if you want to continue this discussion.
If it becomes an imminent threat, reglaciation may be easier to avert than warming. Right now, we know more about how to heat the planet than how to cool it off.
Reglaciation is an imminent threat—and we don’t know if we would be able to stop it.
A lot of the misguided research on mitigating global warming has investigated how to cool the planet down. I know of no research effort on a similar scale devoted to heating the planet up. So, I am not clear about where the idea that we know more about how to heat the planet than we do about how to cool it is coming from.
Well, it’s fairly well-known that putting a lot of greenhouse gases will warm up the planet. ;)
Sure—and there’s also black carbon:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1938379,00.html
...and planting trees in the north:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tropical-forests-cool-earth
Hopefully in due course we will have fusion and mirrors in space on our side as well.
I don’t think anyone knows if a concerted effort could prevent reglaciation, though. If anyone wants to make the case that we should downplay the risk of reglaciation because we could avert it, I would say: prove it. This looks potentially extremely dangerous to the planet to me: show me that it is not.
Until we are much more confident in our climate control abilities, I think a safe distance is prudent. IMO, that involves at least melting Greenland.
The planet? The planet is used to glaciers. It’s the humans who may not like them.
I mostly mean the planet’s lifeforms. Few living things like ice crystals. They typically rupture cell walls—causing rapid death.
You make a valid point, but you neglect to mention that the same temperature/pressure regimes that generate ice crystals also make metals (especially scrap metal alloys) very brittle and prone to cracking, not to mention long-term effects on malleability.
Kind of a big thing to leave off!
You have a point there. If you want to build something out of metal and not have it break—and there are lots of important things that can be made out of metal—a cold environment makes it harder.
That was what we thought ten years ago. There has been considerable and surprising progress on ice sheet dynamics. Basically, ice sheets do not melt from the top. They crack, fail mechanically, and slip into the sea. This is especially true of those whose base is below sea level, specifically the West Antarctic Ice sheet (WAIS).
14 Ka ago sea level rose by several meters per century for several centuries. The mechanism was the partial failure of the WAIS. There’s still some left.
Don’t get me wrong; this will not happen next week, and there will be no resulting tsunami. But a meter of sea level rise in this century is likely, two is plausible, and four isn’t totally excluded.
You seem fond of don’t-worry arguments. This makes you an instance of Eliezer’s point.
You sound as though you are arguing with something in my post—but it is not clear what—since you don’t really present much of a counter-argument. Greenland and Antarctica really do have enormous thermal inertia. Ice really does take a long time to melt—and Antarctic ice really is an average of 2 kilometres thick.
You are arguing with the “it will probably take tens of thousands of years to melt it”? Consider that a ballpark figure. Currently the Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker and thicker—and it is −37 degrees C down around the pole. So: it is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Perhaps paranoia has its place—but I think it is best recognised as such.
Those who make calls to action often distort the picture—to make their cause seem more urgent.
So: such causes become surrounded with distortions and misinformation designed to manipulate others.
We don’t need to melt them to raise the sea level. All that ice floating around does just as well.
We have had around 1.7 mm per year for the 20th century.
That seems pretty slow to me.
It is true that the record—at the peak of the last glacial retreat—was some 65mm / year—but there was a lot more ice all over Russia and Canada back then—and we are unlikely to see anything like that with today’s much-smaller ice caps.