Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
Your basic point is not true. We can still avoid 2 degree warning look up the IEA's 450 ppm scenarios. It would take a Herculean effort but it's not impossible.
Second your conclusion is not smart.
Even if we can't avoid 2 degree warming, 3 degree warming is better than 4 and so on. Your conclusion conflicts with truism 6, that dealing with it now is cheaper than dealing with it then.
An analogy to your point is getting a flood warning and not sandbagging the dyke. We can't prevent the flood so may as well do nothing. But what if reinforcing the dyke reduced flood damage by half? That's what we're dealing with here.
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My understanding is that due to the lag in effect of cutting C02 emmissions and seeign atmospheric reductions is that even if we stop emitting now we still go over the 2 degree mark. Haven't looked at the most recent models though. Either way its certainly not politically possible.
I disagree with Truism 6. It fails to account for new tech and fails to recognize that currently we do not have the technology to reduce our carbon emmissions by 97%. In all likelyhood advances in technology will reduce the cost of solving the problem from the present cost.
I guess my conclusion wasn't well stated. My opinion is that we should not spend money reducing Carbon Emissions when we know that isn't a possible solution either politically or technically. Instead we should focus dollars on finding geo-engineering solutions that allow us to emit carbon at our current rate while reducing global warming. To do anything else seems like paddling upstream. You will never change China and India's C02 emmissions therefore you will never be able to effectively reduce global C02 emmissions. Spending money chasing after C02 emmissions is throwing it away.
As a society we will never sacrifice the present for the future so all solutions need to be framed around that fundemental fact.