Thanks for the kind words. As for fighting poverty, that would be an entirely new post to explore in depth, let me just say that although education is great, and I support it, all the education in the world doesn’ help you if you live under a totalitarian government that can confiscate anything you own. Such and environment, as well as corruption and taxation that is too high are the single biggest factors that keep nations mired in poverty.

As for Government being a ‘first adopter’ I don’t think that that is too big a deal, and for all the advantages we may get there are equal detriments, for example a dead end or unviable technology being adopted by the government not for sound reasons but because of lobbyist pressure.

Katinula,

If anything we do to alter our environment is an adaptation than I suppose you are correct. But in that case overcome nature and adapting to nature are synonyms. We change ‘nature’ all the time, and for our benefit. We should continue to do so.

Rock on. doesn’t make it not cold outside though. In fact, your action is an adaptation.

On the topic of Kyoto, bang on. Here in Canada it’s been a big bone of contention between the former Liberal government and the new Conservative one, and despite being a lefty I find myself siding with the conservatives. Environmentalists have fallen into the trap of “We have to do something - this is something - we have to do this.”

One role for government I think you’ve missed is as a first adopter of new technologies, to help create economies of scale that will make it feasible for private actors to buy in as well. A good example would be fueling infrastructures for alternatives to gasoline (and I’m talking about those that are feasible now, such as ethanol fuel, gasahol or compressed natural gas, not ideas still in development). Most governments have big enough fleets of vehicles that they could afford to have their own pumps, which they could then allow the public to use if the fuel turned out to be economical.

One more point - I agree that we need to get serious about global poverty, but I disagree that protection of private property is the most important barrier (it is an important one, of course). I think universal access to primary education, especially for girls, is more important. An educated population demands more of its government, and demands more of itself in terms of work ethic (which leads to greater prosperity).

Great post on the whole. I haven’t read your blog before, but after this I might have to start.

here is almost the same article also from the USGS with a graph of the 2100 projected sea level rise, note that the scale is in inches and it tops out at 20.

As for the U.S. vs. Mongolia, it might surprise you that their is good evidence that the U.S. is a carbon sink not a carbon source. Certainly there is some controversy about this, and even more uncertainty about why and if it will continue to be that way, but that just highlight how little we know about the various feedback loops involved.

Hamsters on treadmills would probably releasse methane, another greenhouse gas.

I am well aware of all of the different studies on Hurricanes and Global Warming. We know that their are multi-decadal cycles (see page 9 of this for an informative graph that shows this clearly. 1970 was the start of a lull, hurricane activity began increasing greatly in the mid-90s. Global Temperature didn’t change that much in the first half of the 90s compared to the second half of the 90s, yet hurricane activity is markedly different.

I don’t doubt that global warming will increase hurricane strength, but I doubt that it is a primary driving factor and the differences will be reletively minor. Suffice it to say that their is a lot of controvery and I find the doomsday claims fairly unconvincing. Computer Modeling is a useful tool, but it is not evidence in and of itself.

Regardless, even if the global warming worst case scenarios on hurricanes are correct, as I pointed out there are better and easier ways to mitigate hurricane damage.

It also goes on to talk about the interglacial periods in the past, and how our current sea level is 2 - 30 meters lower then it was during past periods. And, we have been in a interglacial period for quite a while now. So, it stands to reason - even with out human intervention, we could be looking at an increase of 2 - 30 meters over the rest of this interglacial period.

As far as poverty being the issue here - The average US citizen unloads about 120 pounds of C02 a day, and the average mongolian releases about 15 - 20. Poor people tend to use a lot less C02 then rich.

Getting more countries richer seems like it would exacerbate the problem, not make it better!

We do need to overcome global poverty, but we must do it in a renewable way. Just giving everyone coal fired power plants and SUV’s will simply make the problem worse. We need to invest in clean energy, and push that technology out to the rest of the world - be it biofuels, nuclear power, cheap fusion, solar, or lots of hamsters on treadmills.

How much power do you think that a Hamster on a treadmill would produce? Perhaps I will have to experiment…

As far as hurricanes go - NOAA has this to say:

The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth’s climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although we cannot say at present whether more or fewer hurricanes will occur in the future with global warming, the hurricanes that do occur near the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate conditions. This expectation (Figure 1) is based on an anticipated enhancement of energy available to the storms due to higher tropical sea surface temperatures.

The article that you quote is based on out dated science. In the past year, several studies have talked about this very topic.

I don’t know where you get 2-3 degree celcius cooler being ice age temperature. Glacial periods are about 5 degrees C cooler. In any event, warming and cooling are not necessarily the same thing, I submit that it is easier to deal with 5 degrees warmer than it is to deal with 5 degrees cooler. As I said, this will have signifigant impact, but ‘global meltdown’ or similar scare terms are an exaggeration.

As to Kyoto, I can’t find the source that I have seen before, but in general the consensus that I am aware of is that global warming will be about .15C less in 100 years if we enact it than if we don’t. That is very minor, at huge costs.

Energy efficiency is all well and good, and I support doing what we can there. There is no way to be efficient enough to have a growing economy without a growing energy supply though. Skeptical Optimist had a great post on this recently. Look at the numbers, then dispute me if you would like.

Anti-poverty, i.e. having wealth is crucial for dealing with any sort of change more effectively, including climate change. The more resources we have, the better we will be able to cope with anything. If the sea level were to rise half a meter tomorrow, the people in Bangledesh would have a lot more trouble than the people in Manhattan.

Do you mean 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius? There’s a pretty significant difference, not the least of which is that a comparable drop in average world temperature in the past occured when there was an ice age — a glacier over Washington State and New York. So an increase of that magnitude isn’t minor.

I disagree with the conclusion of your point 7, if not the facts. Yes, the Kyoto Protocols would be insufficient on their own to cool the earth to a point where I would feel safe. But insisting that any solution to global warming be all-or-nothing is a recipe for doing nothing. Addressing the problem will probably only be done with a series of incremental steps rather than in one fell swoop.

I sort of agree with the statement of point 9, but I don’t think that the relationship between economic growth and energy use is deterministic. It’s certainly possible to have economic growth and waste a lot of energy at the same time. Some minor, stupid things like using more efficient light bulbs or not blasting air conditioning in office buildings on days when it’s 60 degrees outside (like the building where I used to work!) aren’t necessary for there to be economic growth.

I agree that anti-poverty measures are a good thing, although I’m not sure what this has to do with global climate change. The poorest people on earth have a much smaller carbon footprint that the richest people on earth.

Hurricanes go on a natural cycle, see this article for background. Global Warming may have a minor effect on hurricane strength, but far more signigant to the study you mention is a natural periodic cycle.

There are real environmental issues relating to hurricanes that should be looked into and are far more signifigant than global warming. Loss of coastal wetland and erosion of barrier islands makes these storms more damaging and expensive. That is not a global warming issue however.

The sea level map you cite has it’s minimum sea level rise at 1 meter. That is the worst case scenario and hence quite unlikely to happen. 11 to 80 cm is a resonable estimate (and about the closest we can guess which gives an idea of the degree of uncertainty present.) I would guess that less than 40 cm is most likely. This is not something that doesn’t matter at all, but there are numerous ways we can handle it if it comes to happen.

The “scary thing”, he added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.

“The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we don’t have an analogue in our records,” he said.

We are at a place where we cannot determine what is going to happen over the next 20, 30 or 100 years with the climate. All that we really know, is that it’s changing. Some parts of it are changing faster then they have in the last 800,000 years!

We do know several things.. The average world citizen pumps 24 pounds of C02 into the atmosphere a day. The earth can scrub about 9 pounds/person/day right now. That leaves us with a increase of 13 pounds per person per day. And the earth is not going to be able to catch up, because tomorrow, we out produce it by another 13 pounds. That’s 3.2 million tons per year that we are increasing the carbon levels by.

I think that the problem will not be the ’slight increase’ in the sea levels (Check out this map for more information about rising sea levels). It’s going to be the effects of the increased energy into the climate.

a study published in Science showed that, while the number of tropical cyclones had not increased between 1970 and 2004, their strength had surged: Category-4 or -5 hurricanes where more than 50 percent more frequent in the second half of that period than in the first