(I never said the climate was random. While I'm no climatologist, I'm not that much of a dunce. I said chaotic, I meant chaotic.)
If we're to take that concept seriously, then we're in one of two situations, given the data which unequivocally suggests persistent warming over the last half-century, and we know that the "naive" impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration is to warm the planet.
1) We are not near any relevant "breakpoints" in any of our climate variables, and increasing CO2 concentrations will have its obvious effect for the foreseeable future: increasing global warming.
2) We are near some kind of "breakpoint", and increasing CO2 concentrations will cause our climate to do something drastic and unpredictable. Who knows what the impact of this would be, but it would be a gigantic gamble, triggering anything from a massive shift in ocean currents to a new ice age to runaway warming. Or it might do nothing relevant. Who knows?
Preventing the first situation from coming to pass has (slightly) predictable effects and costs, and it seems pretty obvious to me that the costs of prevention are far lower than the costs of a cure. This is marginally true for optimistic scenarios, and overwhelmingly true for pessimistic ones.
Preventing the second situation, where the result is deeply uncertain, seems like something we should be doing out of simple risk aversion, playing as we are with the one and only known inhabitable biosphere in the universe. There are very few conceivable "win" scenarios, where the climate actually improves somehow. Almost any drastic change is going to be a net cost, possibly a massive one. Shouldn't we be extremely conservative about anything that might upset this rather pleasant status quo, at least until we can be relatively (never absolutely) certain that what we're doing won't trigger such a disaster, given how plausible it seems?
A couple hundred billion dollars seems like a trivial price to pay for that kind of insurance. Even a few trillion doesn't seem out of line, worldwide.
-Jester
If we're to take that concept seriously, then we're in one of two situations, given the data which unequivocally suggests persistent warming over the last half-century, and we know that the "naive" impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration is to warm the planet.
1) We are not near any relevant "breakpoints" in any of our climate variables, and increasing CO2 concentrations will have its obvious effect for the foreseeable future: increasing global warming.
2) We are near some kind of "breakpoint", and increasing CO2 concentrations will cause our climate to do something drastic and unpredictable. Who knows what the impact of this would be, but it would be a gigantic gamble, triggering anything from a massive shift in ocean currents to a new ice age to runaway warming. Or it might do nothing relevant. Who knows?
Preventing the first situation from coming to pass has (slightly) predictable effects and costs, and it seems pretty obvious to me that the costs of prevention are far lower than the costs of a cure. This is marginally true for optimistic scenarios, and overwhelmingly true for pessimistic ones.
Preventing the second situation, where the result is deeply uncertain, seems like something we should be doing out of simple risk aversion, playing as we are with the one and only known inhabitable biosphere in the universe. There are very few conceivable "win" scenarios, where the climate actually improves somehow. Almost any drastic change is going to be a net cost, possibly a massive one. Shouldn't we be extremely conservative about anything that might upset this rather pleasant status quo, at least until we can be relatively (never absolutely) certain that what we're doing won't trigger such a disaster, given how plausible it seems?
A couple hundred billion dollars seems like a trivial price to pay for that kind of insurance. Even a few trillion doesn't seem out of line, worldwide.
-Jester