The world is getting warmer, on account of we keep piling on the down blankets. This is how the Washington Post puts it:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of hundreds of scientists from 113 countries, said that based on new research over the last six years, it is 90 percent certain that human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half-century.
Although I regard the WaPo as a very respectable paper, I am not inclined to believe something just because they said it. I am more inclined to believe something because Ron Bailey says it. In addition to being a friend of mine, Ron is the science correspondent at Reason magazine. He is a libertarian, and those folks tend to be pretty scrupulous when it comes to arguments and evidence. Here is how Ron puts it:
Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now. The question of what to do about it will be front and center in policy debates for the next couple of decades. How strongly humanity may want to mitigate future climate change and at what cost depends on how likely the worst case projections turn out to be.
If Ron says the debate is over, I figure it's probably over. But then, I thought the debate, like your average super bowl game, wasn't much of a contest anyway. The world is getting warmer, and, mea culpa, we are in large part responsible.
The question is what we can do about it, and the answer to that is: sell your beach front property. I have been listening to so many discussions of global warming solutions on NPR that every time I close my eyes I see carbon scrubbers and wind farms. So far I haven't heard anyone propose anything that is likely to make a difference. Back to the WaPo:
Declaring that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the authors said in their "Summary for Policymakers" that even in the best-case scenario, temperatures are on track to cross a threshold to an unsustainable level. A rise of more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels would cause global effects -- such as massive species extinctions and melting of ice sheets -- that could be irreversible within a human lifetime. Under the most conservative IPCC scenario, the increase will be 4.5 degrees by 2100.
Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the lead authors, said the world would have to undertake "a really massive reduction in emissions," on the scale of 70 to 80 percent, to avert severe global warming.
I think that makes my case. To "avert severe global warming" we would have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 70 to 80 percent. As my one time friend Terry McDonald said, about going straight and flying right, "we ain't gonna." The greatest increases in green house emissions are going to come from India and China. India is a Democracy. No government that tries to put a lid on its economic growth will survive. China is not a democracy. But its totalitarian state is always like a lid on a boiling pot. If it tried to seriously arrest its own economic growth, the pot would blow the lid off.
Maybe there is some technological magic dust out there that can be sprinkled about to absorb all the excess carbon. But even if there were such a wonder, and there isn't, the world would still keep warming through the next century or so. The right question is not how to stop global warming, but how to deal with it. The only way out of the problems of technological development is through technological development. Only if we continue to grow in technological power can we adjust to the changing environment and eventually bring it under control.
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