Iain, I’m curious: even if we’re unable to stop 2 degrees of warming, shouldn’t we try to stop 3 or 4?

Iain, your entire comment is hogwash.

“We both know that when it comes to the science that you actually have a great deal of trouble just enunciating the fundamentals of the scientific method ”

We both know that? Really?

Yes we do, but you are in denial of that most pertinent fact.

LOL, way to (you) run your sentences through the Microsoft Word thesaurus. You are completely wrong here. The “proposed panacea to the perceived problem” is just another right-wing meme from denialists who have embarrassed themselves again and again in global warming threads, and want to throw the disucssion(sic) off on another tangent. It is a legitimite(sic) discussion, but not one for this thread.

I have no idea how to even access “Microsoft Word thesaurus” But then I don’t need to, because I have a very good command of English and I can write sentences that are clear and cogent. The first one that I quote above is yet another example of your inability to do likewise. (suggested correction in brackets)
Strangely for all of your sound and fury about those you claim have “embarrassed themselves again and again” it is their message that is taking the shine of the hyperbole that passes fro AGW advocacy and religious fanatics like your own good self just can’t stand that.

“My default position on this issue is that even if the climate is warming[,] that we will have to adapt in any case so that focusing to[o] much on futile efforts to “stop” climate change is just a very silly waste of money and effort[.] when really we need more of this approach to the planet[’]s climate[.]”

Is this your attempt to try to redeem your credentials as a master of English language? Now I’ll concede the “too” and my unfortunate habit of adding a space in front of punctuation marks (which is of no consequence at all) But you missed my failing to capitalise “When” and you wrongly cite my using the possessive case for “planet’s” as an error. If you insist on making a big deal about my very minor typos then please proof read your own writing more thoroughly to avoid embarrassing yourself as you do in teh previous passage that I quote above .

Of course that’s your argument! You get to hedge your bets either way! But what if it is human activity(that) is the cause? What if the planet does get too hot for humans to survive on? Of course, it will go back to normal eventually. Last time it took a speedy 60,000 years.

Just where did you get the figure of 60,000 years? As far as I am aware all AGW enthusiasts claim that the current warming is “unprecedented” and last time I looked “unprecedented” means that it has never happened before. So please cite your source for that figure and just when the “last time” actually was.

“We both know that when it comes to the science that you actually have a great deal of trouble just enunciating the fundamentals of the scientific method ”

We both know that? Really?

“As such opinions about the viability of the proposed panacea to the perceived problem is as much a legitimate direction for the debate as the considering the veracity of the science is.”

LOL, way to run your sentences through the Microsoft Word thesaurus. You are completely wrong here. The “proposed panacea to the perceived problem” is just another right-wing meme from denialists who have embarrassed themselves again and again in global warming threads, and want to throw the disucssion off on another tangent. It is a legitimite discussion, but not one for this thread.

“My default position on this issue is that even if the climate is warming[,] that we will have to adapt in any case so that focusing to[o] much on futile efforts to “stop” climate change is just a very silly waste of money and effort[.] when really we need more of this approach to the planet[']s climate[.]”

Of course that’s your argument! You get to hedge your bets either way! But what if it is human activity is the cause? What if the planet does get too hot for humans to survive on? Of course, it will go back to normal eventually. Last time it took a speedy 60,000 years.

Being your classic denialist, Iain is so incompetent at arguing the science he instead diverts it to issues he thinks he can score a win with, the ETS being one of those issues.
We both know that when it comes to the science that you actually have a great deal of trouble just enunciating the fundamentals of the scientific method Even so this post is not about the fundamentals of the science it is about response to the issue from the right side of politics. As such opinions about the viability of the proposed panacea to the perceived problem is as much a legitimate direction for the debate as the considering the veracity of the science is.

As Tim Lambert wrote: If your roof was leaking, but you couldn’t afford to fix it, would that mean you could pretend your roof wasn’t leaking? No. Pretending global warming doesn’t exist won’t make it go away.
This is a rather poor analogy actually, because even I don’t deny that climate change is happening. The climate of our planet is dynamic, chaotic and ever changing. The real questions are all about whether we can prove that human activity is the cause of that change and if it is, can human activities be altered enough to deliberately modify the climate towards some thing that is more beneficial to humanity.
My default position on this issue is that even if the climate is warming that we will have to adapt in any case so that focusing to much on futile efforts to “stop” climate change is just a very silly waste of money and effort when really we need more of this approach to the planets climate,

As Tim Lambert wrote: If your roof was leaking, but you couldn’t afford to fix it, would that mean you could pretend your roof wasn’t leaking? No. Pretending global warming doesn’t exist won’t make it go away.

While these things exist they are in long term decline, at least in regard to the proportion of the population affected. The decline started round about the time the UN and EU were founded. The fact they haven’t solved the problem instantly doesn’t mean these institutions have not contributed to massive declines. The same will be the case with Global Warming, the question being whether we act quickly enough to avoid the most severe effects.

Au contraire mon frere, how it could happen looks clearer every day. The 2010s are going to be a decade of gently but steadily declining emissions in the developed world, and of slowing growth in emissions from the developing world – that is the realistic outcome to expect from the current round of climate diplomacy, it is the degree of climate change mitigation we presently have the political will to achieve, whether it is achieved through a U.N.-wide agreement like Kyoto, or through great-power bilateralism, as occurred in trade after the WTO began to seize up. Most of these grand blueprints for limiting atmospheric CO2 to 550 parts-per-million or 450 parts-per-million feature a much more rapid rate of reduction from 2020 forward, and one need only posit that, after another decade of technical progress and another ratchet upwards in measured global temperatures, the will and the means will be found to go all the way to zero emissions in the 2020s, in which case that would be the decade in which CO2 levels finally peak and, consequently, the problem stops getting worse.

So that is the politics of it. As for the technical feasibility of a zero-emissions economy, I do not have a complete blueprint to offer, and even if I did it would be rejected as a fantasy of central planning that would never happen because people resist being told what to do. However, one can see the outline of a solution if one first sees the outline of the problem.

http://www.wri.org/image/view/9529/_original

The problem is very approximately one-third land use, one-third energy (transport and electricity), and one-third industry (energy not included). So in a slogan, the answer is clean energy, clean industry, and carbon-neutral land use – and that’s not even taking into account the possibility of dedicated sequestration industries which chemically create artificial carbon sinks, for example by accelerating mineral carbonation. We all know that clean electrical generation is possible, whether from nuclear or from renewables. For transport, the basic solutions are electric vehicles and clean fuels. Industry I admit I have not studied, but I even hear of ideas for carbon-sequestering cement, and emissions from cement manufacture are the largest single industrial contribution. With respect to agriculture and forestry, again I am relatively ignorant, but the hardest thing to deal with here may be the N2O emissions coming from fertilizer use. If we can’t feed the world without generating those, then we may just have to rely on offsets from other sectors (such as the dedicated sequestration sector) in order to counteract their effects.

Jono: ‘Moving to a society of “zero net emissions” is not a single change, but rather a coercive government plan to change every single transaction in the economy. You can’t just will it into existence.’

I think the development of the wired world we have now is an excellent model for how this stuff is likely to happen. There was no U.N. millennium development goal saying that half the world must have a mobile phone by the end of 2007, and yet it happened anyway. The spread of mobile phones was a far more hedonic process than will be the adoption of sustainability, but it’s not as if people lack the motivation. Every day, the fraction of the world population who expect to be alive in 2050 and beyond, and thus who expect to personally experience the long-range consequences of climate change, is increasing. Climate change mitigation is increasingly a matter of simple self-interest.

sneering hatred

Are you auditioning for a gig with Quadrant by any chance?

Oh yes it was. By the Pentagon, to be precise, which as government as it gets.

It was the accumulation of decades of knowledge, entrepreneurship and free markets that created the PC and network technology.

Moving to a society of “zero net emissions” is not a single change, but rather a coercive government plan to change every single transaction in the economy. You can’t just will it into existence.

Just like you or I cannot simply wish into existence the next big technological breakthrough to rival the internet.

How does anyone in their right mind think George Bush represents the “right of ideas”?

He’s just introduced the New New Deal – the biggest expansion of socialism in decades. He has expanded the welfare state, the warfare state, given unprecedented powers to the Treasury and the Federal Reserve which leads to government destruction of the currency and a spiralling deficit.

We’ve had the biggest growth in global socialism in the past year, as a response to financial problems created by socialism.

I think its a terrific thing that our politicians don’t deal with long term issues. Because if they even attempted a 5-year plan or 10-year plan, it would fail as miserably as Mao’s and Stalin’s glorious revolutionary plans.

How can a bueraucracy, even with the smartest technocrats in the world, hope to plan for things that are entirely unknown and unpredictable ? The economy and the climate are but two examples.

And another point – just who are these neo-liberals ?

The Liberal Party is occupied by socially conservative statists who occasionally talk about free markets while they double the size and scope of government every decade.

the amount of doubt about the theory of AGW reaches into just about every aspect of the theory.

That’s true, but the amount is very small.

AGW is not the only known influence on the climate system, but no model can explain recent warming without including AGW, there are specific observations strongly suggestive of AGW, and there are no observations that are, within our levels of uncertainty, strongly disconfirmatory of AGW.

In this context proper scepticism means accepting, on a provisional basis, that AGW is highly likely to be contributing to recent warming and is projected to increase warming in the future.

All it really requires is a single change: a move to a society of zero net emissions. Now that’s a big change but it’s comparable to the advent of the Internet. It’s something that might reasonably take a decade, not “centuries”, and once it’s done, it’s done, you can move on to other things.

If it were as easy to do as it is to say then I would agree with you but my question is not about “what” it is about “How” and I think your answer makes it very clear that you have not got the foggiest idea about that.

dk.au

Well the only lingering area of legitimate uncertainty was over discrepancies between land and Satellite measurements, which were accounted for some years ago now. What other evidence would suffice?

You are kidding aren’t you? the amount of doubt about the theory of AGW reaches into just about every aspect of the theory.
As for my later paras If you can;t grasp that our impotence in the face of eternal war and conflict means any attempt to do something larger is less likely to work than our peacemaking then you must truly be from another planet.

The essence of all science is to be sceptical about every theory until there is enough empirical evidence to support the hypothesis.

Well the only lingering area of legitimate uncertainty was over discrepancies between land and Satellite measurements, which were accounted for some years ago now. What other evidence would suffice?

You appear to have contradicted yourself the latter pars. On the one hand, you’re all emo about ‘lesser’ problems – apparently we haven’t been able to do anything about them because there are still instances of war etc. breaking out. Then you deny they’re too big.