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timtyler comments on You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof - Less Wrong
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Maybe we're thinking at different scopes. Each unit of that graph represents 10,000 years. Messing with the climate now risks expensive disasters that stall economic and technological development over the next 500 years. Unless you think a glacier is going to be crushing New York City between now and then the best thing to do is develop as much as possible and learn things until you can confidently hack the climate.
Global warming is benign, though. The changes are generally positive. The idea of warming causing an expensive disaster that stalls economic and technological development is a fearmongering fantasy - and is not supported by science. The faster warming happens, the more quickly the Earth's carrying capacity will go up, the more food we will be able to grow, the faster the deserts, arid regions and icy-wastelands will vanish, and the more minds and resources we will have to dedicate to our real problems.
Those who want to stop warming appear to have identified technological development as the cause of the problem in the first place - and seem to be doing what they can to sabotage development - by restricting the access to resources by businesses - thereby attempting to cut off their air supply. My assessment is that such behaviour is likely to have a destructive effect that increases the planet's risk of reglaciation.
In the long run, they may be positive. In the short run, melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets means that most of Manhattan Island, most of Florida, and plenty of other very valuable developed land will end up underwater. The cost of relocating the inhabitants and rebuilding the infrastructure would be enormous, easily reaching into the trillions of dollars. Might as well drop a hydrogen bomb on New York City!
ETA: The "hydrogen bomb" comment was stupid and gratuitous. I blame sleep deprivation.
Well thats of course not right. The primary loss in dropping an H-bomb on NYC is the loss of human life - both in a moral and an economic sense.
Here is a point to consider. Over the last 100 years the population of the earth has increased by 5 billion. We have created new places for all of those people to live and work. And that was done with a population much smaller than we have today. Over the next 100 years we may add 3 billion more and we will need place for those people to live and work.
Its not immediately clear that the costs of building all of this in a new location is that huge relatively speaking.
That would be a special sort of hydrogen bomb that expands by 3mm per year, I presume.
Okay, bad metaphor.
::sigh::
That's what I get for commenting when sleep deprived. :(
Ok, icy wastelands I can see. But the deserts and arid regions? Our deserts here in Australia seem to have more than enough heat already. And the most fertile land is that which is right near the coast, ready to be covered in salty water as the ice melts. Then all we would have left is desert.
According to Jared Diamond's book Collapse, Australia's biggest agriculture problem is a lack of good topsoil; you really can't farm it very well because if you don't return the nutrients from the plants to the soil by not harvesting, you end up unable to grow much of anything at all a year later.
Deserts are mostly an ice-age phenomenon. The positive effects of increased evaporation and precipitation eventually dominate as temperatures rise. Check with the humidity rises in northern Australia to see the effect - or see:
"Sahara desert goes green, thanks to warming"
Increased precipitation may also mean more hurricanes and other destructive storms. :(
Regardless of whether the ultimate effects of global warming are a net positive or negative, there are likely to be costly disruptions, as areas currently good for agriculture and/or habitation cease to be good for them, even if they're replaced by other areas.
Exactly.
I'm sure we can both produce a long list of positive and negative effects of global warming. Picking out items from the "negative" list does not constitute much of an argument - you have to look at the big picture.