Charles Pierce does his usual exemplary job of hauling Marco Rubio out to the woodshed, and I can’t improve on it. I do want to mention though, that he missed one point that is a common mantra of the climate change denialists.
RUBIO: "What I said was that humans are not responsible for climate change in the way that some of these people out there are trying to make us believe for the following reason: I believe the climate is changing because there has never been a moment when the climate is not changing..The question is what percentage of that — or what is due to human activity?…If we do the things they want us to do — cap and trade, you name it — how much will that change the pace of climate change versus how much will it cost our economy? Scientists can’t tell us what impact it would have on reversing these changes. But I can tell you with certainty that it would have a devastating impact on our economy."
That’s such a bad question, it’s not even wrong. We don’t care what percentage of the change is due to human activity.
Here’s a metaphor to explain that: picture a balance. On one pan is a mass representing carbon being pumped into the atmosphere; on the other, a mass representing the carbon being extracted. Both of these processes are going on all the time, and have been for billions of years: a plant breathes in, extracting carbon and fixing it as carbohydrates, the plant dies and that carbon is released by decay or burning. The two sides of the balance are roughly equal, with variations over time, but they’re mostly stably in equilibrium.
Just to make it concrete, imagine that we’ve got 10 kilogram weights in each pan.
Now we add human activity: someone adds one gram to one side of the balance. It’s a difference of only 0.01%. But the arm of the balance will inexorably tilt toward the heavy side. We care about the total amount of human-contributed carbon load, because that’s what we have to remove or compensate for in order to restore the balance…but the concern right now is the slide downward on one side, that is getting greater and greater even if we stopped throwing more mass at the problem.
We’ve thrown all this carbon that had previously been sequestered — it used to be on the side representing extracted carbon, and human activity has moved it to the other side. We have an imbalance, and it needs to be corrected, and while the Rubios of the world are fussing over exactly how severe the difference is, the problem is increasing.
Went to a talk given by one of the people involved in the conspiracy/deniers comparison paper. Used some statistics (which I really need to brush up on) to show that basically that just because there isn’t certainty about the outcomes isn’t a reason to not do anything, because the more uncertain things are the more the potential damages could be. And the cost of dealing with that. So the best thing to do, in order to reduce the cost of damages is to reduce uncertainty, which can best be done by reducing all these extra emissions.
Even if it were 100% natural … wouldn’t we still want to do something about the probably-trillions of dollars of damages, the millions of dispossessed, the massive toll of natural destruction? It’s like the creationist fallacy for environmental science. It’s just a mountain of excuses for complacency and corruption.
The way I look at it is what is the worst that could happen? If we change things to prevent global warming, and we’re wrong that global warming isn’t human caused, we will have adjusted our economic system for nothing, but that doesn’t mean we’ll have adjusted it for the worst (though there are almost certainly going to be difficulties during the adjustment period). If we are right about global warming, and do nothing, what are the costs? I think the balance sheet is tilted toward doing something about global warming, even in the absence of 100% certainty (and the scientific evidence is strong, even if not 100%)
They also the miss the question of how much more will it cost in the future compared to how much it will cost now. But humans are not so good at thinking in the long term.
This kind of reminds me of the old adage about being shot with an arrow; do you really need to know where it came from before letting someone pull it out?
This has been the 50 year-long mantra of politicians and interests groups opposed to changes in environmental standards and it has never come to pass.
What sort of mystical knowledge does Rubio have, that he can tell us things scientists can’t?
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” – Russell
Standard denialist’s equivocation fallacy, equating lack of complete knowledge with complete ignorance (look, those scientists can’t decide if the Earth is 4.53 or 4.54 billion years old, therefore my claim that it is 10,000 years old is as valid as anything else).
karmacat, #4 ->
exactly my thought, seems to me, the economy is in line to take a fairly big hit if the biosphere collapses.
Isn’t there a reasonable case to be made for politicians who deliberately and quite manifestly only see one side of the story (the side that is most convenient to them) to be prosecuted for negligence?
I read Rubio as saying the usual apologetic of, “Okay, even IF we are the cause, the problem is too big to fix now, so why stop, it’ll cost too much to get little or no fix. So we gots to carry on; making no changes (that’ll just be throwin moneys down the loo).”
Whenever they complain about the uncertainty being so large, they always suggest that things might not be so bad, but they never talk about the chance that the consequences might be worse than we think.
Where did his faith in the power of the free market go? Does he really believe that no enterprising Real Americans (TM) will find a way to make money with innovative green technology?
But I can tell you with certainty that it would have a devastating impact on
our economythe enormous profits made by various oil companies who are extracting public resources for personal gain while not contributing a single fucking penny in taxes. There is one paragraph at the link that has me giggling:I wonder if any of the GOP candidates even understand the hilarity of the Merovingian dispatch rider joke? *snicker*
well his statement quoted here about the economic effects is true when taken as the some what exaggerated short term narrowly focused statement it is.
While short term the changes will likely be disruptive, long term will probably be greatly stabilizing to even the oil companies as we move away from burning the hydrocarbons and into making plastics, lubrications, and other chemicals out of the feed stock.
the reactionary and other extremist rhetoric has always used exaggerated loaded terms and language to manipulate the people in the exact same way advertizing does. we have laws about truth in advertizing but no such thing exists in politics.
uncle frogy
Unlike climate change. No drought threatening California’s agriculture whatsoever, no sir.
This is an old article which shows that it is entirely possible to change your primary energy source, promote conservation and environmentalism, and have a robust economy. The Whale Oil Myth
Rubio uses a lot of fancy words to state what can be said in just a few: Accepting climate change as fact costs the Kochs money.
1. As already noted several times, how much will not doing anything about global warming and sea level rise cost our economy?
2. Estimates are, just adapting to global warming in this century will cost the USA ca. $1 trillion. In case Rubio is reading, one trillion dollars is a lot.
3. The drought in California which no one knows will end. San Diego just spent many millions on a desalinization plant. California is spending billions on upgrading their water systems. The worst drought isn’t even California. The US southwest has been in a drought for 14 years.
Louisiana is spending $50 billion to try to fix their disappearing coastline. Supposedly, since the state is broke under Jindal.
Florida is already spending money to adapt to sea level rise, especially in Miami, which is already seeing flooding at high tide.
This list could go on for pages.
4. Rubio is an idiot. This isn’t the only dumb thing he has said.
That would be like 5% of the per year cost of the Iraq war and it would go directly into actually protecting the country. That’s commie thinking right there.
The sentence as amended by Tethys is certainly true, but Rubio is not completely wrong. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions as fast as the science indicates is necessary to have even a good chance of avoiding disastrous climate change, very large behavioural changes are required – like much less long-distance travel, particularly flying – as well as huge investment in renewable energy and the infrastructure to use it, the housing stock, the transport fleet and other areas – and poorer countries will have to be given extensive and expensive help to keep them off the fossil-fuel-based development path. This is all technically feasible, though by no means easy. But given the stranglehold big business has over the political process, something like a revolution will be required to make it happen. The science says unequivocally that much of the accessible and potentially accessible fossil fuel reserve cannot be burned. The logic of capitalism says that as long as it remains profitable to burn it, it must be burned.
There is already so much global warming baked in by the CO2 rise, that it will continue for centuries, no matter what we do.
1. We have to adapt. This isn’t optional, it is dictated by reality.
2. Estimates for the world this century are a cost of $15 trillion. However, this estimate is very uncertain since we have very limited knowledge of the future. It could be much higher.
3. Who is going to get hit the hardest are the poor countries. We can easily afford a trillion USD over the 21st century. They can’t afford anything.
4. The big problem might be climate refugees. People in poor countries that get hit by droughts or flooded out by the sea aren’t going to be able to do anything but move.
And that means their global warming problems are going to be our global warming problems as they move north and to First World countries.
I have to disagree with you here. “Now we add human activity: someone adds one gram to one side of the balance. It’s a difference of only 0.01%. But the arm of the balance will inexorably tilt toward the heavy side. We care about the total amount of human-contributed carbon load, because that’s what we have to remove or compensate for in order to restore the balance.”
How much does matter. You could imagine it was an amount so small that the cumulative difference would be negligible until the sun eventually expands into a red giant. More, humans are upsetting many such balances, from topsoil loss to ocean dead zones. Among these, you don’t worry much about sunlight blocked by satellites, even though it is caused by humans and is growing, because its effects so far are so, so, so small.
You’re a scientist, damn it. A real one. Quantity matters.
I don’t think he’s asking what percent of carbon in the atmosphere comes from human as opposed to natural sources (the correct answer being that all of the net carbon is human-caused), so I don’t think that the balance metaphor applies. I think he has this idea that there is some natural warming occurring as a backdrop against anthropogenic warming, and that if say, 90% of the warming were “natural”, then our best efforts to reign in the anthropogenic part would be of little use.
What’s stupid about it is that we can measure how much warming is due to human GHG emissions, and the answer is “almost all of it”, and it’s going to continue to accelerate. There’s no evidence of some mythical natural warming mechanism that coincidentally started up right when we put lots of carbon into the atmosphere, and that will somehow completely swamp out anthropogenic warming even when it gets up to the several degree range.
I’m pretty damn certain that averting or mitigating climate change is no longer on the cards. Even if there’s still time left, the required action is not going to occur. That would demand that the human race as a whole act with maturity and foresight at the expense of short-term gain. When exactly does that ever happen?
It’s unethical to not keep trying, but environmentalism becomes more Quixotic with every day.
Anything that reduces GHG emissions mitigates climate change. Climate change isn’t a one-off disaster, temperatures will rise indefinitely as long as atmospheric carbon concentrations keep going up.
Humans turned off Niagra Falls (150,000 gallons a second) twice and now regulate its flow for aesthetic reasons (to minimize erosion).
Humans created Lake Mead (28 million acre feet of water at peak) by constructing a dam.
Human activity is visible by naked (human) eye from space.
Humans completely paved over and topographically altered a 23 sq mile island.
As of 1970, Humans have caused no less than 5,200 acres of the San Joaquin valley to subside from 1′-28′. Obviously, it has subsided more since then.
Yet—according to the know-nothing teabaggers and their Koch masters—Humans are incapable of altering the climate. Right.
I always love this one. The people who froth about “alarmist” predictions for climate will happily, in the very next breath, accuse any such alarmist of wanting everyone to shiver in unheated caves gnawing on uncooked root vegetables.
In fact, a conversion to renewables – especially if it’s accompanied by a big investment in “negawatts” to reduce demand – will be a huge boost to jobs and the economy generally. Wind power is already, in many places, as cheap as or cheaper than fossil power plants. Solar power is a bit more variable. But if we improve insulation and the energy efficiency of household and commercial structures’ equipment and appliances as much as we can, rooftop PV solar can readily supply most, often all, power needs of the occupants of that structure. The costs of other solar power methods vary in current comparisons to fossil power, but the only cost trajectory is downwards.
Basically, all many countries have to do is to look at their existing fossil power plants and work out the best timing for replacing them with renewables as their economic life runs out. That replacement was going to happen some time in the next 2 or 3 decades. The only question is whether to make the move sooner or later. If the decline in the cost of the renewables replacements goes any faster, many plants might be replaced sooner than anyone might expect.
And all of that means jobs, jobs and more jobs. Which means money, profits, for people with the good sense to put their money where it was always destined to go. But sooner.
[Carbon sequestration]
South Africa’s Spekboom (“Bacon Tree”) to the rescue. Portulacaria afra sequestrates 10 times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforest. And elephants love it. And it is delicious in salads.
Grow the stuff my pretties!
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating.
Okay deniers, let’s say that all of the extra carbon, all of it, was entirely due to natural processes. Now what? Are you saying that the only goal of science is to find out who’s fault something is? That so long as it isn’t YOUR fault, it’s fine that global warming is going to cause massive destruction to everything we hold dear?
Basically, what I’m saying is this. Regardless of what is at fault, we need to do something if we want to survive.
Now, all that said, it’s totally the fault of humans here. Not me, personally, but like a bunch of humans did stuff that collectively lead to this.
Rubio needs to push for clearing the rain forests to prevent all that carbon from re-entering the atmosphere. Reagan warned use that all air pollution comes from trees and volcanoes, so this would take care of two problems simultaneously.