h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"GW will probably cost huge sums of money, which will be bad for the global economy."

This week's Economist puts the cost of tackling climate change at 0.1% of global GDP per year. Seems remarkably good value to me.

Current GDP, according to the World Bank, is $bn44645.4, so 0.1% is $44bn a year.

Given that profits from big oil companies are more than that, I find that hard to believe. But I could well be wrong.

I read somewhere on the BBC news website last year that the *subsidies* to CO2 emitters (eg oil, gas etc) was $237bn. Cutting these subsidies could go some way towards making that total I suppose.

The calculation is based on reducing CO2 levels to 550ppm by setting a Carbon price of $20-50 per tonne by 2020-30. The effect would be to reduce global GDP in 2050 by 1.3%.

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From...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6620909.stm
quoting a UN conference in Bangkok

"The sharpest cuts, keeping greenhouse gas concentrations to levels equivalent to between 445 and 535 parts per million of carbon dioxide, might cost anything up to 3% of global GDP by 2030, while milder curbs could even enhance growth."

" ..many researchers believe that keeping concentrations below about 450ppm CO2-eq is necessary if the average global temperature rise is to be kept below 2C, and major impacts avoided."


So 3% would be about $135bn per year, which is a lot of money.

550ppm (from WA's post) seems an awful lot, I think at the mo we're about 375ppm. It doesn't bode well in my opinion, although I'm no expert.

Maybe this technology will help, maybe not. But either way, isn´t it just damn cool?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6616651.stm

Don't worry, nothing to worry about. Just a few maintenance problems. Normal service will be resumed presently.

Thanks, JC. Always so comforting.

I've only skimmed the backlog so forgive any repetitions or statements of the obvious.

To me the three most interesting components of this slow motion crisis are the initial warning(s) in the '70s, the UN report ( http://unfccc.int/2860.php ) and the commercialization of carbon.

The first provided a solid base for scientists to get further funding and politicians to use it as political tender. It also gave carbon producing businesses a heads up. The report brought it all out into the open and allowed the people to pressure the politicians and the businesses. The last gave the politicians a way to sell change to both the people and businesses.

As to what is causing global warming, there isn't a model big enough to prove anything either way. OK there is one, the only one.

>>"Nuclear power stations take about 10-15 years to build, then they run for about 20 years before taking 100 years to decommission. They are long term projects. Can you imagine the outcry if a nuclear site, even one that is closed, is flooded? Do you have any idea just how much that would contaminate the seas?"

Current plans seem to be to build new nuclear stations with an eye to rising sea level.

Even for something a bit close to the sea, when it comes to decomissioning, once an end-of-life a reactor is defuelled, the subsequent long wait is largely to allow for the highly active short-lived nasties created in the reactor metalwork to decay to manageable levels before it can be cut up and disposed of.
If sea levels did start to rise, you only need to keep seawater off the bits that used to be in the hot zone. How hard would it be to build a 10m high concrete dam around that relatively small area, or even concrete over it completely, especially if the reactor construction had been designed with that possibility in mind?

zoomer, I think most scientists agree tha global warming is caused by man. What is your basis for saying the cause is unknown?

I think that the evidence is very strong that global warming is caused by man, yes. My point was that there can be no certainty because of the complexity of the model. Thus we can get theories that contradict that.

I would hesitate to add *like,,,so and so* since everything from evolution to abortion can be a matter of perception. We can't even say that white is white and black is black since once again that is how we individually perceive them. All I mean to say is that none of us can speak in absolutes.

Perhaps there is a solar component to the climate change, perhaps it is large or it is infinitesmal. Are you willing to completely ignore it?

There is an interesting post on RealClimate about how to fiddle things about to get a correlation. The post was intending to show the shortcomings of the solar theory, but I think it applies to both sides of the argument. Make sure you treat things with scepticism and check up on the data behind a graph, and *especially* how the graph has been 'smoothed' - because that can completely change what it shows.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/fun-with-correlations/

That particular post uses a few basic techniques to prove that "the fortunes of the Republican party in the US Senate are tied closely to the sunspot cycle."

zoomer, we're about to have the highly recurring argument about the language of science. In science, a theory is something well established with lots of supporting evidence - theory of relativity, etc. By this accepted definition we do not get "theories" that contradict the theory of man-made global warming. We do however get hypothesis (ideas without a lot of solid supporting evidence) that contradict it.

Secondly, there is never complete certainty in science, there always is the knowledge that new evidence can supplant old theories. This is independent of the complexity of the model. Despite the complexity of the model of climate, most (over 90% at least) scientists agree that global warming is caused by man. That is an incredibly high level agreement - the sort reserved for scientific theories. So in essence, when you state there can be no complexity, either you're overplaying the level of uncertainty, or you're restating the fundamental tenet of science.

I'm not a climate scientist, but based on what 90+% of them are saying, I'm willing to say it is not the cause of global warming. Does it affect the climate? certainly! Is it ignored by proponents of the theory of man-made global warming? Not at all.

crud, sorry.

"...there can be no complexity..."

should be

"...there can be no certainty..."

Theories can contradict each other, there is nothing in the definition that says they can´t.

Not scientific ones, at least not in the direct way that the solar-activity and man-mad global warming theories do.

AA, I don't want to challenge the definition of theory and I do as I said agree that mankind is causing climate change by most if not all indications. I just wanted to point out that the complexity of a global system means that we can hardly hope to state we know every and all causations or results. A theory can be a generalization, that's all. A highly provable, most likely and obvious generalization but one none the less.

Just as we can guess what the weather here is going to be like next week through observation (I bet it's cloudy on the weekend and sunny during the week), we can't have absolute certainty.

Any scientific theory is based on "facts" often from experimental results. But some results can be interpreted in different ways. And due to lack of facts, you can have different theories which say opposite things. But as more facts come to light, the probabilities of those theories change untill one becomes the generally accepted.
Though if you were saying that two opposing theories can´t both be correct, well that is probably true.

That was what I was saying.

I was taught that 'true' science was the development of a theory, and the subsequent experimentation to prove that it was WRONG, not to construction of experiments or 'models' which might prove it RIGHT.

Novo

Very true, Novo.