Based on the voting patterns, I’m going astray somewhere. We don’t seem to disagree on the facts (high CO2 levels, past environmental damage) and I’m not seeing arguments directed at my reasoning, beyond the criticism of “surface analogy” that I’ve done my best to adress. So I’ll let this be my final comment on the topic, and hope to find insight in others’ discussion.
We quite agree there hasn’t yet been a catastrophe on the scale predicted for AGW: we wouldn’t be having this conversation if there had been. If you read the original post all over again, you’ll find that was its entire point. Don’t demand that particular proof.
The Pacific Trash Vortex cannot reasonably be described as ‘catastrophic’ in my opinion
We don’t want to play dictionary games with the word “catastrophe”. One constructive proposal would be to consider the cost to our economies of cleaning up one or the other of these environmental impacts—including their knock-on effects—versus the costs of prevention. We haven’t incurred the costs of the Trash Vortex yet, it’s not making itself felt to you; but it’s nevertheless a fact not a prediction, and we can base estimates on it.
The typical cost of cleaning up an oil spill seems to be on the order of $10M per ton. The Pacific garbage patch may contain as much as 100 million tons of plastic debris. As an order of magnitude estimate, one Trash Vortex appears to be worth one subprime crisis, albeit spread out over a longer period.
We’re clearly in Black Swan territory, and yet this is just one example picked almost at random (in fact, picked from what Silas took to be counterexamples).
I’m not seeing arguments directed at my reasoning, beyond the criticism of “surface analogy” that I’ve done my best to adress.
Ok, I’ll try and make it more explicit. Your reasoning seems to be that our experience with complex systems that we don’t fully understand is that disrupting them has bad unintended consequences and therefore the burden of proof is on those who suggest that we don’t need to take drastic action to reduce CO2 levels.
I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise because it seems to me that there are no examples of bad unintended consequences that we haven’t been able to deal with without paying an excessive cost and few examples of bad unintended consequences that even end up with a negative overall economic cost. The only reasonable argument for adopting the kind of drastic and hugely expensive measures necessary to significantly reduce CO2 levels is that the potential effects are so catastrophic that we can’t afford to risk them. There are no examples of similar situations in the past, though as you rightly point out that is not strong evidence that such situations cannot happen since we might not be around to discuss the issue if they had. On the other hand there are lots of examples of dire/catastrophic predictions that have failed to pan out, although in some cases mitigating action has been taken that means we haven’t had the control experiment of doing nothing.
It seems to me that the burden of proof is still very much on those who argue we must take very economically costly actions now because unlike previous problems which have turned out to be relatively cheap to deal with this problem poses a significant risk of genuine catastrophe.
One constructive proposal would be to consider the cost to our economies of cleaning up one or the other of these environmental impacts—including their knock-on effects—versus the costs of prevention. We haven’t incurred the costs of the Trash Vortex yet, it’s not making itself felt to you; but it’s nevertheless a fact not a prediction, and we can base estimates on it.
It’s also important to consider the cost of doing nothing and dealing with the consequences. The trash vortex is a problematic example to use here because there have not been any significant bad consequences yet. It may be a fact that it exists but I haven’t found any estimates of the economic cost it is imposing right now and only vague warnings of possible higher pollutant levels in future.
If the cost of doing nothing about CO2 levels were similar to the cost we appear to be paying for doing nothing about the Pacific Trash Vortex then it would be a no brainer to do nothing about CO2 levels.
Based on the voting patterns, I’m going astray somewhere. We don’t seem to disagree on the facts (high CO2 levels, past environmental damage) and I’m not seeing arguments directed at my reasoning, beyond the criticism of “surface analogy” that I’ve done my best to adress. So I’ll let this be my final comment on the topic, and hope to find insight in others’ discussion.
We quite agree there hasn’t yet been a catastrophe on the scale predicted for AGW: we wouldn’t be having this conversation if there had been. If you read the original post all over again, you’ll find that was its entire point. Don’t demand that particular proof.
We don’t want to play dictionary games with the word “catastrophe”. One constructive proposal would be to consider the cost to our economies of cleaning up one or the other of these environmental impacts—including their knock-on effects—versus the costs of prevention. We haven’t incurred the costs of the Trash Vortex yet, it’s not making itself felt to you; but it’s nevertheless a fact not a prediction, and we can base estimates on it.
The typical cost of cleaning up an oil spill seems to be on the order of $10M per ton. The Pacific garbage patch may contain as much as 100 million tons of plastic debris. As an order of magnitude estimate, one Trash Vortex appears to be worth one subprime crisis, albeit spread out over a longer period.
We’re clearly in Black Swan territory, and yet this is just one example picked almost at random (in fact, picked from what Silas took to be counterexamples).
Ok, I’ll try and make it more explicit. Your reasoning seems to be that our experience with complex systems that we don’t fully understand is that disrupting them has bad unintended consequences and therefore the burden of proof is on those who suggest that we don’t need to take drastic action to reduce CO2 levels.
I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise because it seems to me that there are no examples of bad unintended consequences that we haven’t been able to deal with without paying an excessive cost and few examples of bad unintended consequences that even end up with a negative overall economic cost. The only reasonable argument for adopting the kind of drastic and hugely expensive measures necessary to significantly reduce CO2 levels is that the potential effects are so catastrophic that we can’t afford to risk them. There are no examples of similar situations in the past, though as you rightly point out that is not strong evidence that such situations cannot happen since we might not be around to discuss the issue if they had. On the other hand there are lots of examples of dire/catastrophic predictions that have failed to pan out, although in some cases mitigating action has been taken that means we haven’t had the control experiment of doing nothing.
It seems to me that the burden of proof is still very much on those who argue we must take very economically costly actions now because unlike previous problems which have turned out to be relatively cheap to deal with this problem poses a significant risk of genuine catastrophe.
It’s also important to consider the cost of doing nothing and dealing with the consequences. The trash vortex is a problematic example to use here because there have not been any significant bad consequences yet. It may be a fact that it exists but I haven’t found any estimates of the economic cost it is imposing right now and only vague warnings of possible higher pollutant levels in future.
If the cost of doing nothing about CO2 levels were similar to the cost we appear to be paying for doing nothing about the Pacific Trash Vortex then it would be a no brainer to do nothing about CO2 levels.