Seleuceia gets my vote for best post of the thread (#443).  3 cheers.

As I said before, gasoline is a waste product from making the others.  You can't turn gasoline into plastic, it's what you have left after you've already made the plastic.  Using fossil fuels is like getting everything out of the pig but the squeal.

err .... NO

Gasoline along with various other hydrocarbon bi-products are derived from the fractional distillation of crude oil.

Treating and blending of various distilled fractions can be made into plastics and polymers.

^ Hankers is absolutely correct. 

Does the "when" really matter?

The most compelling argument imho is the simple fact that we're rapidly reversing a process that took many millions of years to complete: putting CO2 from air into coal layers took millions of years. What we are doing now, is digging up oil those coal layers and oil fields, and putting everything back where it came from (the air). And we're not doing is slowly, we're doing it on a massive scale. We're adding 2ppm/year into the atmosphere and people are thinking that we can continue like this forever.

In about 1000 years we'll have reached Triassic levels of CO2 (and probably temperatures); by then all icecaps and all glaciers will have melted, adding about 70 meters to the water level. That means, 0.7 meter of sea level rise per decade, not including thermal expansion.

I suppose maybe we're worrying a bit too soon. There isn't much to fear at the moment, and I suppose it will only become a real problem after a very long time.

On the other hand, why should we wait until problems become urgent?

Why should we let problems accumulate and become more and more expensive to handle, while we can still take action in time?

And with "in time" I don't mean today, but in the coming decades.

We will have to take action anyway, whether now or in 100 years. And in 100 years it won't be any cheaper than it would be now, it would probably be even harder (because if we continue like this, more and more money is thrown into CO2 producting technology, all of which is a complete waste on the long run). Now is better imho, so that our generation will go into history as a generation that had the courage to take action and to take responsibility for the future of mankind.

If "our generation" means the 'ME-Generation' currently flavour-of-the-month you have no hope.

...and neither does mankind....;p

Sure.......... then why are doomsday movies so popular nowadays? People care, even if it's at the most basic level. They get the message from TV, it's just a matter of getting it across in a way that appeals to them.

The following might be a simple enough....

1. if we continue like we do now, the world will be full of coal plants in 100 years. Building, maintaining and heating those plants will cost us a whopping 100 trillion dollars (or something like that) in total over those 100 years. In addition, temperatures will rise by 1 or 2 degrees. Also, cities will be covered in a haze (like in China). Coastal areas will flood.

2. if we continue doing that for another 100 years, it'll cost us another 200 trillion dollars (assuming we need more energy for a bigger population) and temperatures will rise by another 1 or 2 degrees. The haze will be even thicker. More coastal areas will flood. Moving cities inland will cost another 10 trillion dollars (or more). Relocating agriculture will cost another several trillion dollars. Spread of tropical diseases northward will add another few trillion dollars of medical cost.

3. etcetera until we end up with an uninhabitable equatorial region, loss of many coastal cities, completely different agriculture. My country (the Netherlands) will not exist anymore within 500 to 1000 years if we continue like this - it will be completely flooded by 100 meters of water.

3. Now... if we don't do that, we can spend all that money on solar cell factories and creating lots and lots of solar panels. We can spend some of the money on reconfiguring the energy grid and the transportation system. And then, in 100 years from now, we'll have cities that are cleaner and quieter. And we'll have avoided a lot of the nastiness that will happen otherwise.

All in all, our standard of living will improve or at the very least it won't deteriote as it would otherwise. The only downside is the investment that's needed to change the infrastructure. But imho it's a good way to spend your money.

Also considere that at the moment in the Western world, about 10 to 20 percent of the population has no work. They are doing nothing whatsoever. It would be nice if this workforce is put to good use. What will people in 100 or 200 years from now say, when they're very busy dealing with the mess we've made (relocating cities, changing agriculture, dealing with widespread tropical epidemics) ... they can point to our current situation and say: in 2013 there were all those millions of people doing nothing! If only they would've done something to avoid the big mess we are in now! 

Because there is more money to be made in a film depicting 'we are fucked' than in devising ways to un-fuck ourselves.

This ain't the first generation to find it trendy to worry about the ecology.....that started half a century ago.

Got us 4/5ths of fuck-all except new generations denying the problem exists.

This is not really true.

In the cold war, many movies were about nuclear armageddon. People cared about that and ultimately, the cold war ended.

Nobody had ever seen a nuclear missile, but they all knew they existed (and they still exist), enough to sterilize the world many times over. It was madness and it ended. Partly because the USSR collapsed, partly because people wanted it to end.

The climate crisis is similar in scope and nature.

Um...yes it is.

I was there.  I don't have to refer to history books.....

Here's a book of interest though.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock 

1970....I was finishing secondary school and wondering what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life as a career ... and/or whether I would have one anyway [Vietnam/conscription].

Social and environmental change has been around - forever.  It ONLY worries people if it is likely to impact upon THEM within their life-span.

If not .... it's someone else's problem.

There've been many people in the past who had visions that stretched a thousand years and they were able to inspire lots of people.

Of course those were dictators like Hitler and Ceasar, but still... it's possible that people get inspired by something that is greater than themselves.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of belief either - like the belief in a God, which can shape an entire society for hundreds of years to come.

Also, we're living in an age of science, where science shapes the world and our view of the world. It shows us the consequences of what we're doing well before it's too late. It also shows us views from prehistoric pasts, of things that happened and from which we may learn.

Compared to 50 years ago, we know so much more ... but maybe it's still a bit early. Maybe you're right and maybe it'll take another 50 or 100 years before things really start to heat up noticeably before people take action. I suppose that's also doable, it'll still not be too late by then, although my country will have some trouble keeping the water out by that time ^^

If we're living in an age of science, how did you convince yourself the Netherlands would be under 100 meters of water by 3000AD...

I'm going to assume that you're pretty young.  To which I say, good for you for thinking about this kind of thing.  That said, it gets very tempting to try to reframe history and events to fit a convenient narrative.

The cold war did not end simply because people "Wanted" it to end. It ended because of the deliberate action of a relatively small group of people.  Good feelings, vibes, desire, etc. did not make it happen. 

Humans have believed they could control the weather since before the dawn of civilization. It's nothing new.  Climate change is a fact. What isn't a fact is how much humans are impacting the global climate. That is what is disputed.  And even if it weren't disputed, we would then have to determine what, if anything, should be done about it.

Every generation has its "Cause" to worry about. History tends to make these causes seem absurd with the benefit of hindsight. Worse, many of these causes led to a great deal of evil being done in their name.

It may seem absurd today but Communism and Fascism were once considered good things. So was eugenics. We also believed, with certainty, that we'd run out of copper by the late 70s and that we'd have worldwide famine by the 90s and that cancer would be rampant due to all the chemical in the food.

Currently, our causes range from CO2 production to organic farming.  But if history is a guide, the cure is often worse than the disease.  

I often challenge people who protest against frakking or fossil fuels to actually do something about it. But few do. Their idea of being on the side of the angels is that they believe strongly in something and that, in itself, somehow matters.  It doesn't.  

I drive an electric car that is powered by a solar array. My house is heated and cooled by geothermal and powered by the sun. I am actually a net producer of energy. Yet, I have people who look their noses down on me because I'm a "skeptic" while they drive 40 miles a day in their minivans to work simply because they hold strong beliefs.  

If everyone who claims absolute certainty in AGW simply lived their lives as if it were true, we would probably have a lot less pollution of all kinds. But as history has shown, people are more concerned about feeling good about themselves and not in actually making the world a better place.

A lot of those major problems were only avoided with MASSIVE scientific and engineering efforts.  For example, global food problems were addressed by huge efforts in genetics, which allowed us to grow more food more consistently using stuff like drought resistant crops.  But developing such stuff costs billions of dollars (at least).  Ditto to stuff like worries about running out of fossil fuels in the 70s.

Generally, I don't think that problems are "absurd" if it took billions of dollars to avoid them.

Now, you might say that we should do the same thing with climate change - use science and engineering the avoid the catastrophe.  I think that everybody agrees.  But the problem is that we don't like the costs of the solution this time.  We absolutely have the scientific capabilities of avoiding the worst effects of climate change.  BUT, there is a price to pay, and we don't want to pay it.  So we are choosing not to pay it, which is just going to screw us over in the future.

Now, you are advocating a bottom-up approach to the problem.  Basically, individuals all go out and do their part.  I agree that that is a good thing to do.  But it can only go so far - if corporations and governments don't do their part, it doesn't matter what individuals do.  After all, all the savings that you get from a buying a bunch of electric cars will get wiped out if somebody builds a bunch of coal factories.  So you also need a top-down component where governments have some control over themselves and corporations to control what is going on.  It has to go both ways, but the top-down component is severely lacking right now.

Essentially, I understand that you feel that you have done your part in the bottom-up, individualistic approach.  But, pretty much any rational analysis (and you can find such analyses out there) show that such approaches are ultimately unsuccessful in addressing climate change without a very substantial top-down component as well.  Individuals doing their part is certainly important, but there has to be a group effort as well.

I agree. None of which happened due to the power of "belief". It happened because people, usually the people being protested against, actually did something.

No, what we don't like is having people telling other people what to do with the point of a gun.  Energy and food production improvements didn't occur because the government mandated it. 

We do? How? Please explain to me (the guy with the solar powered house and car) how we have this capability.

How do you know that? 

Well that's the thing. Government's "doing their part" sounds a lot like governments trying to find a new way to make money to redistribute. That gets people suspicious. Especially given history when earlier predictions proved so untrue.  Chicken Little has a terrible track record.

So they build a bunch of natural gas factories. But then people complain about factories. So then what? Nuclear? People complain about that too. But it's okay because they believe what they believe very passionate and that makes them feel good about themselves and isn't that what really matters?

Why? The food and energy abudnance we have today has nothing whatsoever to do with the government.  If anything, government meddling has merely made the benefit of the private sector weaker since we pay people not to grow food and we meddle in energy production.

The Soviet Union had a truly top-down approach. How are they doing these days? I imagine they had a great environmental record.

This is cute. The "scientific" side of the debate is arguing about how things are going to be 1000 years from now.  

Take any point in human history, look at that points predictions for what humanity would look like in 1000 years and see how reliable anything "in a 1000 years" looks. 

Ludicrous.  

Of course the when matters.  Because any predictions about certain doom, or more realistically, the predictions about the effects of current actions on the world some point far into the future, inherently become less accurate the further in time you travel from the present moment.  This is the very nature of science and probability.  The longer the time horizon you are considering the more variables you have to account for to make an accurate prediction.  And the predictions so far, over a relatively short time horizon, have been pretty bad.  Why should we trust predictions 50 ro 100 years into the future, let alone 1000? 

Actually, those changes did happen, in part, because of the government.

The government does thinks like mandating fuel standards for vehicles, or pollution standards for factories, which has had large effects on the energy crises mentioned above. Or, the government made large amounts of federal research dollars available scientists (often at public facilities) to research genetics for certain types of crops to address food shortages, which addressed famine issues.  That was a major way in which governments addressed another major crises discussed above.

Private forces certainly played a large role in those things as well, but government spending and mandates were a big factor as well.

You can choose to complain about being forced to do things all you want, but read up on the principles of the founding fathers.  They pretty much all said that once something starts to affect society as a whole, its time for the government to step in.  If climate change affects us all, the government has to get involved.

I used to have some DOE links, but I'm too lazy to find them right now, so I'll just summarize part of a discussion I was having with a fairly high up guy in this field the other day.

Essentially, renewable energy sources are to the point where they can produce energy at a cost that is almost as low as non renewable sources right now (exact details depend on the details of the market).  But, the major problem is the renewable sources are a lot less consistent in what they produce - the amount of energy that they produce varies a lot more.  Now, you can average the randomness out by distributing your power over the entire country.  Places that are overproducing distribute the excess to places that are underproducing etc.

BUT, you need a reasonable power grid to distribute that much power.  Our current power grid is terrible and outdated and could never handle things.  But, the government is unwilling to invest in updating infrastructure, so renewable energy sources are a nonstarter since they won't be consistent enough.

But yeah, if you look at the cost per kilowatthour of large scale, state of the art renewable energy sources, its really pretty comparable to fossil fuels.

You're paranoid.  The government doing their part is stuff like "maintaining a reasonable national infrastructure" and "keeping reasonable pollution standards".  This is stuff that is all easily within the expected role of the government.

Except for the huge research dollars that the government put in to develop a lot of the technology to grow better crops.  Granted, the private sector has largely taken over nowadays, but the government plays a huge role in the early days of those research projects.  The early days of a lot of the big energy stuff was pretty government heavy too.

Yeah, and anarchist collectives don't get much done either.  I'm not saying we should do a purely top-down or bottom-up approach.  I'm saying we should do both.  Which makes sense since that approach has repeatedly worked in the past.  Like in the crises that were mentioned above. 

Yes, all we need is for EVERYONE to approach the potential/reality of AGW the same way as yourself.

'Everyone' means the entire planet's population...and grouped 'entities' known as corporations/industry/business/Government.

However, doing so requires a certain freedom for the mechanics of affordability which the vast majority lack, and which Industry/Government/Corporations/etc. do not CARE to afford as they are profit-driven and lack true social conscience other than that legislated upon them by force.

The politics of AGW denial is simply commercially driven....but naturally that denial will be supported by spurious scientific 'proof'.  They really do not want to be 'seen' as 'bastards'.

Simple options such as an Electric car are truly advantageous [if I could afford one I'd have a Tesla in an instant], but there are alternatives....choice of location/work place [again if possible] can dramatically reduce gas-guzzler mileage and thus be benefitial. [I average less than 5000 KM [3000 miles] a year].

It was 1972 Architecture Convention when we really got into the concepts of Urban Decentralization .... getting people to work where they live .... which largely failed [for all sorts of reasons] ... until a revival thanks to the Home Office PC ...;)

This is actually incorrect when modeling a stochastic process like, say, the climate.

If you are modeling a process with many random effects (like year to year temperature variations), those year to year variations will dominate the predictions over the short term.  However, the randomness averages out over time.  That's how statistics works.  Thus, models actually become substantially more accurate over the medium term compared to the short term.

That's why everybody knows that climate change models can't be applied on a year to year basis (or even over just a few years), but can be applied over a few decades.

Anyway, as I've shown above, when you compare the models against the data on reasonable time frames, they have done an excellent job of predicting climate change.  Those links are above if you want.  It's only when the models are applied on inappropriate time frames (the very short time frames) that are dominated by randomness that problems seem to appear.  But that's not really a problem since people who understand this sort of modeling know that this can happen due to the noise.

It just so happens that I understand this sort of modeling and I'm not talking about random walk.  I'm talking about the many, large, model altering variables that have to be accounted for.  In the case of "climate change" and "1000 years from now" we have literally zero chance of comprehending all of the possible variables.  Look at how different we are now than we were 1000 years ago.  And then realize that the rate of technological change has increased so significantly that every few years now equals decades or centuries of technological change 1000 years ago.  We have no hope of building that model accurately let alone building it accurately and then making global economy altering decisions on said model.   

Randomness has nothing to do with it.  Good job killing that straw man you built though.  He's dead. 

Ah.  That.

Who defines 'true'?  Al Gore?

The problem is that the only people who can afford to live like Brad are the upper portion of people in the very wealthiest societies on the planet.  Everyone can't do it even in the wealth countries let alone the 3rd world unless governments pay for it and make it happen.  And that means taxpayers in the rich countries have to make it happen for the entire planet, unless you want to tell developing nations they must cease their development?  Because you can't develop an emerging economy on solar power and electric cars.  The technology is simply too expensive to drive an economy.  

All this for a theory that no one ever bothers to actually prove that humans are a significant contributor to the cause, that the problem is catastrophic and near term and that we can realistically do something about it.  

With AGW it always comes back to Prince Charles and 100 months to save the world.  Lots of emotion and lots of crusading and no logic, science or discussion allowed.  

Did you actually bother to read the MASSIVE IPCC report that everybody was talking about?

It covers, in substantial detail, why humans are a massive contributor to the cause and why the problem is really bad and over what term the problem is bad.  And, its really just a preamble to an even more massive report thats coming out.

So, despite all your whining about nobody bothering to do show something, we actually have massive reports from thousands of scientists on this.  You just can't be bothered to read it.  You know, because you find it inconvenient because it disagrees with your talking points.

Randomness has everything to do with your primary concern - that the models don't good predictions over the short term, and therefore shouldn't be trusted over medium terms.  I mean, you were claiming that the models are not trustworthy over 50 years, which is clearly a reasonable timescale.