Why is this ludicrous... people don't care, so they'll keep on pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. At 2ppm/year of CO2 increase, this will result in about 2,500 ppm of CO2 after 1,000 years.

There is no known cause which would reduce this rate of increase. There's a lot to say that the rate of 2ppm/year will actually increase over time, but let's ignore that as well to be on the safe side and not give any fodder to people like you to comment on. So let's not go into speculation about anything, let's work with what we know now, and all we know now is that we increase CO2 by 2ppm/year.

We can then look back to earth's past. When was the last time such levels of CO2 were reached... well... hey ... the Triassic!

What do we know about the Triassic... well it was hot. No glaciation anywhere. Some would blame this on Pangea... but even with Pangea you'd have polar icecaps and glaciers on mountains. There would be ice somehwere, it would be cold in the northern and southern regions... but it wasn't cold. There were subtropical forests growing at mid-latitudes for crying out loud.

This is hardly science. There's no real modelling involved about processes that might happen. It's a very very conservative thing about what might happen. And what might actually happen.

Now, the next thing is, if that's going to be the case, if there's no ice anywhere, then what kind of world would we have... well all the ice from Greenland and from Antarctica will have melted away! This will add 60 meters of water everywhere. Temperatures will be higher, which increases the water level even more... I don't know how much, but I suppose 40 meters would be an underestimation. That would mean, that global sea levels would've risen 100 meters.

My country, the Netherlands, is for the most part at or even below current sea level. Add 100 meters to that and my country will have disappeared under 100 meters of water.

This will almost certainly happen in 1,000 years if we continue exactly as we are doing now.

This brings me to the next point... responsibility. Should we blame the last generation for all that water and temperature increase? Or are we also partly to blame. I think we share the blame as well.

That means, in 1000 years from now, we'll be to blame for 1 meter of sea level rise and 0.1 degree of temperature increase for every decade that we continue like we are doing now.

This is called linear interpolation... which is also one of the safest interpolation you can make, because you make no assumptions. You could be wrong, but at least you won't have made an assumption which could be wrong too.

Now... this in itself doesn't mean that the sea level will really rise by 1 meter every decade. Who knows, maybe it will start slowly and maybe there will be some catastrofic melting and flooding later on. But that's not really the point... for future generations 1000 years from now, we are sharing responsibility for such things.

And I'm not young, I'm 42 years old and I've had a solid scientific education in geophysics. Although I didn't pursue that career, I became a programmer.

And I'm not saying that it will really happen in 1,000 years. I hope people will come to their senses before that. But given that the process is very gradual and people are pretty ignorant most of the time, maybe every generation will have this same discussion that we are having now, thinking that the present is "normal" and that the future is not their concern. So for all I know, a Triassic event might actually happen in 1,000 years.

And anyway this is not intended as a realistic future prediction. It's just that people don't believe in climate modeling and science. So this is the most basic example you can have, which you can easily understand and think about. It's as basic as it can get. You can draw your own conclusions from it.

I always love the conspiracy theory angle.  It's a great way to pretend to know a lot while insulting everyone who disagrees with you in a nice, deniable manner. 

I'd say more, but the Koch brothers are pulling the string on my hands away from my keyboard....

Please - do show us these numerous works that don't agree with their conclusion. Please show us the "real science". Is there another "Oregon Report" you'd like to share? You have no clue what you are talking about.

Again, another link to a summary of the IPCC 5th Report findings that covers some of the typical denialist strategies:

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-ipcc-report-on-climate-change/

This quote in particular hits the nail on the head:

"If the opposition continues to resort to tired fallacies, bad arguments, and distorted evidence, that only serves to increase my confidence in the consensus."

At this point, people who disagree with AGW either have not read the evidence or they are engaged in motivated reasoning according to their biases so they can continue to cling to their ideological worldview. This has nothing to do with whether you as an individual drive or bike or recycle or use solar power or whatever - it's a drop in the ocean. The first step is at least acknowledging what the evidence to date shows and agreeing we are contributing to climate change. Maybe there is nothing that can be done about it. Maybe you personally will not notice the impact in your lifetime. But if you are spreading misinformation, confusion and doubt - that is only helping to ensure there will be no effort to do anything. I don't understand the argument over government intervention/support vs. entrepreneurial efforts though - obviously both are important and necessary.

Even assuming all the true-believers are right about AGW, a fact I dispute but will stipulate for arguments sake, which screws the 3rd world more?  The eventual consequences of AGW or having their economic development destroyed because they can't afford non-carbon based fuel development?  

You say "in 100 years" in your post.  100 years of economic development, improved quality of life, and access to more advance technology to combat the effects of climate change when they arrive or the chance, and it's just a chance, of preventing climate change, but folks in Rwanda make $2,000USD per capita 100 years from now instead of $650USD per capita now. In other words their lives haven't improved at all.  

The people in Rwanda take the improved life and possible AGW over stagnant life and chance at no AGW every time.  Guarantee it. 

Or we let everyone except Europe and the US keep developing as they are, we limit CO2 emissions in those countries only and we accomplish nothing except harming the core of the worlds economy because the CO2 production is offset by growing economies around the world.  

I am not American, so not that into conspiracy theories. Enlighten me on the conspiracy theory angle I made?

I do not care about the detail of their economies. The Sahara desert will increase in size (and is atm) making more of africa uninhabitable, rising sea levels will screw countries like Bangladesh a lot, and in the case of the Seychelle Islands, remove them from the map. Notice a pattern where the most dire consequences happen to the poor countries? (as you mentioned, we rich countries have the technology and infrastructure to deal with it)

So what are the consequences in the first world? Ice retreats, lots of new land will be available for food etc. (flooding not as critical as Bangladesh etc. as well) Hell, global warming is a good thing for me personally where I live, as long as we can keep the third worlders away from our land. Specific countries are beside the point, food and water is still the most important commodity all over the world, and global warming will decrease the 3rd worlds access to both, and increase the 1st worlds access. I look from the global perspective, the doomsday predictions are way over the top obviously, the consequences are real however.

If I really wanted to provoke I would say that Global warming is a conspiracy to eradicate the browner races at the benefit of whites. (and you better hope that the 3rd world does not gather around this idea eventually, but I highly suspect they will if we keep this up at some point in the future) 

Why didn't you quote my other post or myfist0's post? Cherries must taste really nice when you pick them in the fall, right?

It's ludicrous because we're decades away from having real, viable alternatives to carbon-based fuels.  Once those alternatives are cost effective they will overtake carbon fuel as the source of fuel and your feared 2ppm/year goes away. 

The argument isn't, and never has been, should we get off of carbon fuels.  That's going to happen.  Just like we got off of horse-powered everything and then whale oil powered everything, when the technology is ready oil-derivative fuel goes away. 

The argument is over whether or not the supposed coming catastrophe is

1. actually coming 
2. going to arrive before we've naturally switched to alternative fuels 
3. actually is man made
4. something we can actually affect. 

I"m fine with solar power. Looking forward to it even.  As soon as it's cost effective enough that it doesn't cost my family quality of life OR as soon as someone has proven that NOT switching to solar (for example) is going to destroy the world (which impacts my family's quality of life) AND that my switching to solar will help prevent it.  

I quoted this one because this is the one where you bitched about rich people being the only ones who could afford it.  That's a point I have been trying to make and you and others keep pretending doesn't exist.  

I'm not cherry picking at all.  In fact I seem to be responding to nearly everything at this point.  

As for your other posts, doing all of those other things (lights off, turning down hot water, etc) are great, except they'll never do fuck all about AGW.  Either this is a coming catastrophe requiring major action from the world's most powerful governments or it isn't.  My water temperature is irrelevant, as is the air pressure in my car's tires. 

If you want to do those things to make you feel good, fine.  I do them too, but to save money on my gas and electric bills, which my family then spends on other things.  But those behavior modifications will not stop AGW, at least not as its been sold to us.  

And the point remains, if AGW is as bad as you say it is and if it requires the level of action you say it does on the scale you say it does, that action is massively expensive and must be pushed down onto the poor the world over.  It must be, otherwise we're not going to solve the problem.  That's a huge amount economic burden to put on fledgling economies around the world.  

What bothers me most is that true-believers try to pretend that solving AGW isn't a trade off.  Again, stipulating that it exists and we can do something about it (facts I dispute but will stipulate for the sake of argument) solving the problem is still full of trade offs.  Major, global economy altering ones.  Potentially balance of global power altering ones.  Trying to pretend otherwise makes the rest of the true-believers arguments impossible to take seriously.  

No one is bitching.

I pointed out that he said-QUOTE "People who presume to lecture others on AGW should get a fucking solar array and electric car or shut the fuck up."

Can you see the implication of what is being said there? If you cannot, just ask and I will help you.

Your kind of thought is the kind that implies that if someone is losing one million dollars a year, attempting to save twenty dollars is useless. If that is how you feel, fine. I do not feel the same.

It actually is the egg.  In other words, people will buy electric (which are not CO2 friendly considering the power source) when they become price competitive.  So entrepreneurs will not build charging stations because it is not cost effective.  It all comes down to cost.

You do not see whale oil filling stations, yet we moved off of whale oil onto petroleum.  Why?  Cost.

For all those that want to diminish the cost issue, I have but one question.

Have you ever bought anything on sale?  If so, why?

If the thread was about the source work, I would be more than happy to.  However, the IPCC report is a tangent to this thread, so I see no reason in side tracking it.  But I will gladly contribute to your thread discussing the IPCC report - do you have a link?

Wait what? We can run cars on whale oil?

See previous reply - got a link?

And yes I do.  I will be glad to contribute to your thread as soon as I find it.

We can.  We do not. 

See cost issue.

Have you ever even heard of the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Energy?  Man, you are really just being silly here.

I mean, I already did some food stuff above which should just shut this down, but I could start listing some more big science projects that the Department of Agriculture does.  And the DoE...where do you think that nuclear power stuff comes from?  All of that nuclear research isn't exactly privately funded.

Would you like me to start listing energy related projects from the Department of Energy and the NSF?  I can if you would like.  They do a lot of research that has real effects.  You just want to ignore it since you are a libertarian type who wants to pretend that the government never does anything good.

If you had actually read what I wrote, the answer is there.

The problem with renewable energy is the variability, not necessarily cost per kilowatt hour.  Without an ability to shift power across the grid on continental scales, renewable energy is highly problematic due to its variable nature.  If you have a good grid, its doable at a reasonable cost.

At a small scale like you are incredibly hung up on, it is not highly practical.  At least not on a dollar per dollar basis.  But if you are able to shift your thinking a bit, things are a bit different.

Once again, I'm not talking about individuals.  You have got to stop thinking as an individual.  There is an entire field called macroeconomics and you might want to think about it sometimes.

Essentially, the economics of building renewable energy for a single household is NOT AT ALL the same as the economics of building a power system for a few hundred million.  This is obvious.  The DOE has done some studies on this.  If you want more info, I can probably find some of them.

I'm referring to well known, highly influential documents.  Most notably, "On Liberty" by JS Mills.  Essentially, classical libertarian documents like this argue that the government should stay out of the way of individuals UNLESS the actions of individuals are affecting society as a whole, at which point government/society can rightly step in.  That is clearly the case here and is exactly why the founding fathers saw we needed a government - to provide for the welfare of the people (that's why you see discussions about the welfare of the people in the Preamble of the Constitution).

Cures that are worse than the disease...

Wetlands conservation.  My family has property.  Farm land that, 50 years ago, was cleared grazing land on the south end.  Today it's trees and swamp.  Why is it trees and swamp?  There's a highway at the south end of the property, beavers keep the outflow under the highway blocked up where there used to just be a vast flat expanse.  The new "natural" habitat is thus a swamp on the south end.  Technically, anything we do to drain the water is destruction of wetlands.  More absurdly, there's a man that gets fined for cleaning out storm drains because the EPA declared his empty lot a wetland after they built up the roads around it and cluttered drains caused it to flood after heavy rains.  Mud puddles all over the country have stopped construction because after they cleared some ground, it held water as it obviously would stripped of the trees that used to suck it all up.

Clean water.  In Anchorage Alaska, at one point they actually had to pollute the drinking water in order to clean a high enough percentage of garbage out of it to meet standards.  The water supply was clean in the first place.  That's not the only place that had to, I just lived there and had to suffer the changes first hand.  They add so much chlorine and fluoride to the water that it makes some people sick, and brittle teeth are a common problem in middle aged people that drink tap water.  River water comes with fewer health concerns than the faucet.

Telecom competition.  In the US, to prevent companies from gaining monopoly status in communication markets, they were required to sell their bandwidth based on transmission cost.  No allowance for investment or maintenance, just the operational cost of transmission.  The US started as the founder of the internet, the world leader in communication networks, dwarfing the next best in technological advancement of their network.  Who here hasn't laughed at how far behind we fell after they added cable networks into the list of telecoms?

Government interference to save us from ourselves never goes well in the end.  Everything down to the marriage license has been an unmitigated disaster.  Gay marriage would be a non-issue, all these idiots demonstrating over whether it is or isn't legal would be doing something useful with themselves.  The loss of growth in the US just from the state of business licensing is massive.  Tiny little details in life that affect basic choices are screwing us big time.

I could write thousands of pages without even digging deep, without even leaving the US, without even going outside my lifetime.  I'm only 30.  If you haven't seen any, you're blind, live under a rock, and never learned to read braille.

Yet this doesn't apply to the researchers using government grants, the officials in government that want more tax dollars, or the companies that put them in office.  It can't possibly be because GE has windmills and florescent light bulbs to sell.

The oil companies are just evil, turning a profit and paying taxes like everyone else.  The green companies are all puppies and rainbows, selfless humanitarians sacrificing for the greater good at our expense while they bilk the taxpayers before going bankrupt after having paid their political donor executives millions.

How do you know that... that's some big assumption you are making here.

Digging up coal will always be cheaper than making complex things like solar panels, because coal has a very high energy density compared to the energy density of light. For all we know even nuclear fusion might turn out to be very expensive, because it's so technologically challenging.

(I'm saying "always", because there is enough coal around to keep us going for at least several hundred years into the future.)

If you manage to compare what scientists make working for corporations with government work, you obviously need to open your eyes to the real world. Idealists and slackers work for government, money grubbers work for corporations. (that is where the real money is at)

Thank god!  :')

I don't believe you read my post fully. Assessing project ROI involves including the cost in the analysis. If the analysis determines that the project won't generate sufficient revenues to both cover the projected cost and generate the desired level of profit, the entrapaneur will not pursue the project.

As it stands now, there isn't sufficient demand to generate the level of revenues needed to make electric cars and the supporting infrastructure financially viable.

When a sufficient number of people start buying electric cars, the unit cost will decrease.

But it won't happen without a little help.

That is why the goverment needs to step in to give this budding industry a jump start.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/31/news/economy/federal_worker_pay/index.htm

Not that I want to contradict your statement that idealists and slackers work for the government.  Seriously, stick with it.  Then you can explain why I should be listening to a bunch of well paid slackers and idealists that are telling me I have to live a different way to save the planet from their mythical disaster.

Edit:  The budding industry of electric cars has been around better than 20 years.  They've had production line models for at least 15, it's just that no one remembers them because they were terrible.  They actually needed fueling stations then and you got half a dozen miles out of them before they needed recharged.

The modern electric car just needs an outlet at home.  If you need a fueling station for it, it's junk.  You can't just pull into a station and charge it in a few minutes, the capacity on something like that is zip.  The high capacity batteries they use to get comparable mileage to what you'd get from a few gallons of gas would explode if you tried to charge them anywhere near that fast.  Electric car infrastructure is done, completely reasonable to charge them up.  What's not reasonable is distance.  You can't do a cross country trip in one unless you stop for a half hour every hour.  You burn your battery down faster when you charge it fast too.

It's charging stations themselves that aren't feasible, you just can't make it work with current battery tech.  No one is going to take half again as long to go places while they charge their batteries between short bursts of travel.

Brad...it's not about having a Govt 'mandate' change....it's about having the 'something' done on a significant scale, not the noble actions of people with options.

A million or two people switching to Electric cars isn't going to do much of anything towards reversing or even checking human impact on finite resources [and/or AGW].  That 'needs' to be a little more global in scope.

Re 'doing something' about CFCs.... it took poking holes in the ozone layer to prompt that....bit late when you factor in the cost of Melanoma in Australia alone....;)

In this thread even the suggestion of fuel source alternatives such as wind farms is ridiculed as a bullshit waste of money - clearly by someone with an agenda.  The abject negativity towards alternatives is an indictment on man's capacity/willingness to 'do something'.

And again....with the definitely harmful CFCs...when their use was outlawed we lost the BCF fire extinguisher....bit of a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water....;)

If you are talking about scientists here, your link would show that private sector scientists are paid better than government scientists.  Scientists generally have doctorates.

Meanwhile, the federal government is shut down and food production and energy production continue unabated. It's a miracle!

@Krazil, I'm not going to spend more effort refuting what should be obvious.  If you really think the government is responsible for a significant amount of our food production or energy production progress over the past two centuries then I'll let you to that.