From: hal@finney.org
Date: Wed Jun 27 2001 - 12:50:23 MDT
Robert Bradbury writes, regarding the book article forwarded
by Greg:
> > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000166941319210&rtmo=a5hCJuuJ&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/01/6/14/ecfgreen14.html
>
> Greg has hit the jackpot on this one (He must have upgraded is
> Google-chip implant).
>
> > the (Koyoto) treaty will, at best, delay warming by a few years by the
> > admission of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.
I had an interesting email exchange last week with an atmospheric dynamics
researcher. He had been involved in a debate in the Los Angeles Times the
week before with a global warming skeptic. The researcher represented
the conventional wisdom that warming was real and very probably can be
traced to human activities. However he agreed unequivocally with the
skeptic who said that Kyoto would do nothing to help with global warming.
So I wrote to him to ask why, and he explained that according to most
models, if we see say a 2 degree C rise in temperature by 2100, Kyoto
would only reduce it to 1.8 degrees, which is not significant (especially
insigificant compared to the variation in the model predictions).
However he said that he supported Kyoto because it would force the
development of new technology which would make further drops easier.
I wrote back and said that if Kyoto didn't help, wouldn't it be better
to wait until the world was much richer and new technologies developed
naturally so that we could switch over easily? In 1900 horses were a
major form of transportation, and reducing horse usage by 20% would have
been costly and painful. Yet 50 years later they were hardly used at all,
a painless transition. Couldn't we expect a similarly easy transition
away from fossil fuels with the new technologies we will have in hand in
50 years, nanotech and such, without feeling the great pain that a 20%
reduction would cause today?
He agreed that the economics is complicated but was not convinced. Sounds
like this new book explores the cost/benefits in much more detail and shows
just how painful and costly Kyoto would be.
> This is important to understand. Delaying the problem a few years
> does nothing. People are avoiding the tough decisiions that need
> to be made to *fix* it. There are solutions that I've proposed
> but the Greens aren't probably going to like them.
>
> See:
> http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Papers/GWiaRH.html
It's not clear to me that we really have to fix it, or at least that
there is any great urgency. I expect that in a few decades even without
a singularity we are going to reduce our fossil emissions, and we can
then look at measures such as Robert describes to take carbon out of
the atmosphere.
Hal
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