Rant on Climate Change

[CattyNebulart]

There is too much political bickering and name-calling on this topic so lets try to have a reasoned discussion. I'll post a detailed line of reasoning and you tell me at which point you disagree. I'll number them, so say where in the chain of reasoning and assumptions you disagree.
To reduce the shouting about reliable sources only wikipedia is going to be accepted for this discussion since we can all agree it's unreliable.

1. First step, forget everything and who is to blame and conspiracies so forth.
   
2. Let's assume climate indeed changes over time. There seems to be a lot of evidence for this in terms of ice-ages and other cycles over very long periods of time, since well before humans existed. The entire field of Paleoclimatology is based around this. You can see it used to be a lot colder and warmer in the past so let's assume that it can still change.
   
3. Further lets assume that climate affects us in various major ways, such as what crops grow well, the likelihood of storms, and so forth. Of course wikipedia has an article on it.
   
4. From the above it follows that there is a certain ideal climate that would be 'best'.
   
5. We should in theory be able to engineer the climate in various ways.
   
6. Thermodynamics tells us that there are ultimately only 4 modes of Heat Transfer, and since our planet is inside a vaccum (space) the only three ways to change the total entropy (heat) of the planet is incoming radiation, by energy lost to entropy, and outgoing radiation.
   
7. The notion of Earth's energy budget quantifies these a bit and splits some of these categories.
   
8. We can't do much about geothermal or tidal energy, and even if we theoretically could changing our amount of waste heat significantly would be difficult, and it presents a very small part of the overall budget. Most of the energy is incoming solar radiation, and aside from moving the planet or controlling the sun we can't do much there either. Though this will vary as the earth moves through it's elliptical orbit.
   
9. That leaves outgoing radiation, and this is primarily controlled by the atmosphere, clouds will reflect heat and so forth.
   
10. Therefore we should be able to alter the climate by adjusting the atmosphere. This is largely known as Geoengineering.
    
11. It would therefore be desirable and possible to tweak the planet to have the best climate. Not having the 'best' possible climate would have a cost in terms of lost opportunities and so forth.
    
12. Climate is global and therefore everyone should have some say in what the best climate is. Most agree keeping to the climate more or less as it has been in the last few centuries would be best, our croplands and cities are arranged largely on that assumption, but geoengineering is also expensive (so is moving cities, but I digress). Therefore we might have to settle for something that is not best, but still relatively close to it. (I disagree, having another ice-age would be cool )
    
13. Various gases released by our industries do have an effect on climate, so we want to tweak them so as to keep the geoengineering costs down, but this has it's own cost, so somewhere there is a happy medium.
    
14. Since most people and companies do not pay directly for the geoengineering it's an externality if you do something that effects it.
    
15. Scientific consensus is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
    
16. Scientific consensus is that the climate is warming.
    
17. Scientist aren't always right but they are the best we have at the moment.
    
18. If they are wrong we are miss-allocating our resources for little benefit (though cleaner air is nice, and so is less reliance on middle eastern oil. It does mean that millions of people in poverty stay in poverty for a bit longer, and everyone has to make do with a little less.). If they are right we are miss-allocating our resources and for the next century or so we'll need to spend a lot to make up for it in various ways (building dikes or moving cities, geoengineering, possible famines, millions of people dying, everyone has to make due with a lot less.). Given that they are probably right and the potential outcomes of the decisions it makes sense to err on the side of caution and spend more on prevention.
    
19. Since we know how to geo-engineer and how to release more or less greenhouse gasses we can compare the cost of both approaches and pick the one that is cheaper.
    
20. It is generally agree that unless you want to make the planet warmer it's much cheaper to reduce emissions of CO2.
    
21. A fair way to deal with externalities is to tax them, eg if you pollute the water, and a city down river needs to spend an extra few million on water purification it would make sense if you are the one to pay for it. Everything has a cost to fix it, so if you break it you pay for it. It is often very expensive to fix something after it's broken, eg it's much cheaper to spill oil into the gulf than it is to clean it up.
    
22. A fair tax on emissions would therefore be the cost to fix the emission, and if you release a gas that does only good things you get rewarded with a tax credit for how much cheaper you have made things.
    
23. This would apply to everything, so if you have a factory that kills thousands, causes billions in health-care cost and in associated geo-engineering cost to fix it you need to pay those billions in taxes so it can be fixed. If in contrast you have emissions that make people healthier so you save millions in healthcare and geoengineering cost you would get those millions in tax credits.
    
24. If you applied this point rigorously then all coal powerplants would be replaced by cheaper ones. And if the private sector could do a better job of cleanup than the government it would be sensible for them to step in and cash in on those tax credits.
    
25. Due to the massive disruption you would need to phase such a scheme in gradually, and the adjustment would have some cost.
    
26. A lot of ecologicals are not so much concerned with the cost of things as they are with the sin of polluting. It's a very human way of thinking but not very rational.
    

Ok rant over. Some of the things above need citing, but I am lazy.
I know some of these opinions are unpopular and it's a bit rambling
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Jinx999]

I'm really tired of the screams of "The claims of the scientists are an attack on the economy and therefore can't be right" and "Technology and western civilisation are bad so we'll jump on this science which proves we're right" which characterise the two sides of the typical "discussion" about climate change and really don't think we'll be able to avoid it, even here. I know perfectly well that the side you support is perfectly rational with a few unforunate fringe groups hanging on while the other side is a bunch of loonys with a few unfortunate dupes, but bear with me here.

Even if we could leave aside the real problem (the political screaming match), doing experiments when you've only got one test tube and you're inside it is a mite risky.

[Morganite]

I know perfectly well that the side you support is perfectly rational with a few unforunate fringe groups hanging on while the other side is a bunch of loonys with a few unfortunate dupes

The thing about this line that's totally awesome is that you can say it, and no matter what side the person you're talking to is on, it'll probably seem reasonably accurate to them.

doing experiments when you've only got one test tube and you're inside it is a mite risky.

This. I remember hearing a radio show talking about the potential effects of geoengineering disasters... the sort of stuff that would make you wish you hadn't even tried.

(The big concern seems to be that you won't get any sort of global effort, you'll get three or four different countries doing their own thing towards who-knows-what end result, who may or may not know what they're doing, leading to a combined result of everything getting totally bollixed.)

-Morgan.

[Florin]

Even if we could leave aside the real problem (the political screaming match), doing experiments when you've only got one test tube and you're inside it is a mite risky.

Yeah, I completly believe that mankind is causing a least some level of climate change, but some of the proposed 'fixes' make me want to scream "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? YOU'LL KILL US ALL!"
Catty, you mentioned the ole lower reliance on Oil from the Middle East, but (assuming you mean the USA's reliance) there's really no such thing. Most  US oil comes from Canada and Mexico.
Global Response is definitly the sticking point, especially with the world economy already teetering. And places like China are never going to do anything that would endanger their competitive edge.
--
If you become a monster to put down a monster you've still got a monster running around at the end of the day and have as such not really solved the whole monster problem at all. 

[CattyNebulart]

I know perfectly well that the side you support is perfectly rational with a few unforunate fringe groups hanging on while the other side is a bunch of loonys with a few unfortunate dupes, but bear with me here.

Of course, I'm never wrong and always the good guy just like the protagonist in movies and those who oppose me are evil looneys who want to destroy the world, eat babies, and they cut me off in traffic.
It's a common hardware fault, and I am still waiting on a patch, but for now the only option seems to work around it in software. I'm trying to debug it and would appreciate some help. So where in the above numbered reasoning did it jump of the rails?

Even if we could leave aside the real problem (the political screaming match), doing experiments when you've only got one test tube and you're inside it is a mite risky.

We are doing the experiments regardless (adding various gases to the atmosphere), and we really couldn't stop without killing billions of people. This is where risk management comes in.

So where in my chain of reasoning did it fail? I know I'm most likely wrong somewhere, I just don't believe that knowledge.

This. I remember hearing a radio show talking about the potential effects of geoengineering disasters... the sort of stuff that would make you wish you hadn't even tried.

(The big concern seems to be that you won't get any sort of global effort, you'll get three or four different countries doing their own thing towards who-knows-what end result, who may or may not know what they're doing, leading to a combined result of everything getting totally bollixed.)

I expect it will work about as well as large scale government IT projects, ie an absolute disaster. But what is your alternative? Keep in mind that our current industry is geoengineering as a side effect, which means it's not planned or directed.

Yeah, I completly believe that mankind is causing a least some level of climate change, but some of the proposed 'fixes' make me want to scream "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? YOU'LL KILL US ALL!"

What's your alternative? Most geoengineering projects have a lesser chance to cause disasters than the current predicted change.

Catty, you mentioned the ole lower reliance on Oil from the Middle East, but (assuming you mean the USA's reliance) there's really no such thing. Most US oil comes from Canada and Mexico.

Oil is a very mobile commodity and sold on the world market, even if country A was not exporting to country B at all, if B increased their demand A would raise it's prices because the world market price would be higher. From wikipedia the Arab League produces about 30% of the worlds oil, Russia 12% and the US 11%. It doesn't matter from where you buy your oil, since it's a global market and 50% of the supply is supplied by those three.
If the arab league doubles it's prices it would drive more business to the others who would raise there prices to the point where they would maximize their on profits, that is basic economic theory.

Global Response is definitly the sticking point, especially with the world economy already teetering. And places like China are never going to do anything that would endanger their competitive edge.

No argument there. I don't see any way to get a global response on many of these, though the poorer countries will be disproportionately affected by climate change as they depend more on agriculture, and they don't have as many resources to spare on adaptation. This is essentially an global externality, and without a global authority to regulate it the market will not settle at the optimum point.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Jinx999]

Your chain of reasoning breaks down where the debate in the US has got so polarised that one side is denying there is a problem and the other side is denying that we can solve the problem. In Europe, it's similar, but with a somewhat different mixture. In China, it's simultaniously the effect of the greed and profligererancy of the West and a plot by the West to deny China its rightful place in the sun. Geoengineering is making yourself a target from both sides and vulnerable to blame and attack from everyone. In other words, it breaks down at step 1.

[Black Aeronaut]

Sorry for the threadcromancy, but I just happened upon this and felt that it must be said: The first step is often the most difficult. If we can just get everyone on the same page and agree to at least try to work together, then everything else will become progressively easier.

Given that a process like this is usually measured in decades and centuries, expect many years of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth before anything worthwhile actually happens.