Repairing Environmental Damage

Global warming naysayers sometimes take the tack that even if were are screwing up the planet, trying to limit the damage would be too costly. There is one encouraging sign out now though. One of the first examples of global environmental destruction that nations cooperated to deal with was ozone destruction.

This year, we are seeing the first signs of recovery . It's an interesting historical fact that many of the same cast of characters who now deny global warming played the same role with ozone loss, denying and denying until the scientific evidence became overwhelming. Of course the stupidocracy, like Rush the junkie, are still deluded.

The case for anthropogenic climate warming, and its bad consequences, is not yet at that same level of certainty. We should remember, though, that it will take decades more for the ozone to fully recover, but with global warming we might be talking centuries.

Comments

  1. Arun10:34 AM

    CIP, you wanted a discussion on the following from realclimate:

    "From time to time, there is discussion about whether the recent warming trend is due just to chance. We have heard arguments that so-called 'random walk' can produce similar hikes in temperature (any reason why the global mean temperature should behave like the displacement of a molecule in Brownian motion?). "

    IMO, if we have identified all the relevant climate forcings, and know their current history, then the situation is quite far from that which obtains in a random walk. The recent warming trend is not an artifact of chance. Where we don't have a history of the relevant forcings, or sufficient detail, the Brownian motion analogy is indeed relevant.

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  2. CapitalistImperialistPig12:35 PM

    Arun,

    We know all the relevant forcings for a particle undergoing Brownian motion, we just don't know those critical details necessary for prediction of the motion. In the case of climate, the situation is less clear, because we know most relevant details of some forcings, but we probably don't know all, and we certainly are quite limited in our ability to predict. Why? Mainly because we don't really have a detailed understanding of all the feedbacks, for example, carbon sequestration rates as a function of temperature and temperature history, or cloud cover and atmospheric water vapor as functions of the same things. I've also heard it argued that the methane clathyrates are sort of an elephant in the bedroom.

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