Cycloptichorn wrote:You do bring up a good point, though:
Specifically, how will an increased focus on AGW - starting NOW - hurt people more than it helps the environment and humanity as a whole?
Specifically. I have never seen anyone answer this question.
"Increased focus" is kind of a cop-out phrase, though. Will spending extra money on research of alternative energy solutions have a significant long-term negative impact? Hardly.
Limiting emissions -does-, though. CO2 isn't like particulate pollution or nitrates or what have you. You can't scrub it from your exhaust. The only way we have to reduce CO2 emissions is to change from one kind of energy generation to another, or to simply not generate the energy.
Changing the energy generation is probably good, to the extent that we install nuclear systems, or if we manage to figure out how to manage with one of the alternative energy strategies.
Limiting energy generation is bad, bad, bad. Everything modern civilization does requires the generation of energy. All manufacturing, all transportation, the vast majority of services, yadda yadda. Limiting energy output drives up the price, so energy-intensive industries at the margin of profitability cease to exist (or, rather, they move to China or India, or Morocco for the above example, and use power generated any old nasty way to do the same thing.)
Limiting energy generation from a past target, with a growing population, is very bad. It means that we're pretty much guaranteeing, for the first time in human history, that the next generation cannot have a higher standard of living than ours - that they will have more people competing for a smaller resource that's essential for modern civilization. Suggest that this might be a good thing to an economist, and he'll look at you like you've lost your goddamn mind.
Note that there are proposed AGW solutions that don't involve limiting emissions; these would have a much smaller economic impact than capping emissions, even if in and of themselves they represent really huge engineering projects. Carbon sequesterization seeks to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and seal it in things like empty oil well caverns; this is nifty, but we're not good at it yet, and if the carbon gets out of a full cavern, you get "the whole town was asphyxiated" disasters nearby, so there's a significant environmental hazard. I've also seen people suggest changing the albedo by ejecting particulates into the upper atmosphere - you could rig some battleship guns to do the trick, even - or by stimulating plankton growth in the oceans by seeding them with iron compounds, which has the upside that it should stop having an effect when you knock it off, making it harder to "overshoot". These sound like big undertakings, but they're not the kind that put a cap on your GDP...
Pournelle points out that, as far as temperature goes, a little too warm is a LOT better than too cold; slightly more air conditioning and a bit less land mass is much easier to deal with than glaciers in Chicago. ;p
Simply put, how much would it cost to not worry about changing emissions at all, and just dealing with a warmer world? If the cost of attempting to change the climate is significantly more than the "deal with it" cost, then of course we should just deal with it.
To the extent that the various researches would have positive ancillary benefits, well, then we should do those things or not based on their own merits. It's true that more efficient power generation will tend to release fewer of other pollutants as well. On the other hand, having fewer particulates flying around works directly AGAINST global warming, so to a degree we're making that problem "worse" every time we remove things which really are pollutants from the air. Can't win for losing, huh?
