Gristmill: Global Warming Zombie Arguments Page

David Roberts directs Matthew Yglesias to the "Global Warming Zombie Arguments" page:

Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Below is a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by: Stages of Denial, Scientific Topics, Types of Argument, and Levels of Sophistication.

Individual articles will appear under multiple headings and may even appear in multiple subcategories in the same heading...

Comments

[andres]

Global Warming Zombies. Interesting idea.

Perhaps we'll get a movie coming out called "28 Years Later". Produced by Al Gore, the movie would show what happens to people's social instincts when the world climate collapses. Imagine all those already angry southern Republicans deprived of air conditioning. It will make you wish that you're not Left Behind, heh heh...

[PaulC]

That's an excellent repository of counterarguments. I have to admit I did not take global warming seriously enough till about ten years ago or maybe later. I think there is now a growing popular consensus, but it's a shame it couldn't have happened decades earlier when policy changes could have had more effect.

One thing that has always struck me is that to be a typical anti-environmentalist, you have to accept two contradictory propositions. One is that the ecosystem is so vast and powerful that human activities cannot not possibly alter it. This is obviously incorrect on a factual level, but the people who make this claim often combine it with the assertion that renewable energy sources are "piddle power" that will never suffice to meet human needs. This is less clear on a factual level. Solar power gives you about a kilowatt/square meter under ideal conditions, so it would be a massive project requiring significant technological advances to meet growing human needs with solar power exclusively, for instance. But it's clearly a contradiction to claim that the ecosystem is powered almost exclusively by a insignificant energy source and is simultaneously too vast to be affected by human activity.

I can understand people who are merely misinformed on facts, but I don't understand how a sane person can stubbornly hold two propositions that cannot possibly both be true. (Note that it is possible for both to be false: we can screw up the environment using fossil fuels and we cannot necessarily meet all our desires with green alternative energy sources).

[PaulC]

Oops, my parenthetical comment is poorly thought out. I should have said "they need not both be false".

[Slocum]

A useful compendium, but this critical point is dead wrong:

"The U.S. puts out more CO2 than any other nation on earth, including China and India, by a large margin."
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/1/9/172316/4448

No, not by a large margin -- in fact, China will pass the U.S. very soon:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6587493.stm

And, if current trends continue China's emissions will soon exceed those of the U.S. by a large margin. How large a margin? They may be twice those of the U.S. in less than a decade:

"While China's total greenhouse gas emissions were only 42 percent of the U.S. level in 2001, they had soared to an estimated 97 percent of the American level by 2006."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/05/MNG18OFHF21.DTL

From 42 percent in 2001 to 97 percent last year? That works out to an increase of about 20% a year. At 20% per annum, how long would it take for China to reach 2 times the U.S.?

Four years. I give them four years. Maybe five.

And keep in mind that emissions in the U.S. actually declined slightly last year:

http://origin.denverpost.com/business/ci_5971361

And from the same gristmill article:

"There is no morally sane assessment of the global warming problem that does not place a greater burden on the U.S., the worst polluter."

Really? Why is the U.S.'s past industrial growth necessarily morally blameworthy but not China's population growth?

But is that really the right question? Do you really want to live in a world where an authoritarian, internationally amoral China (see Sudan, Zimbabwe) is given a free pass to continue to enrich itself by burning cheap coal while the industrialized democracies are forced to retrench? And where greenhouse gas-intensive production moves to China to evade restrictions in industrialized countries?

What do you do if you think that climate change is a real problem but that the current Kyoto approach is politically doomed?

[kharris]

China has been growing at nearly 10% per year recently (if you believe their stats) and much of that growth has been in the industrial sector, so a 20% annual increase in CO2 output doesn't look wrong. China's most recent industrial lending guidance is apparently aimed at slowing the growth of high-energy-use and high-polluting firms. We'll see how far that goes.

It is pretty clear, though, from the rate of growth in China's economy and CO2 output that capping CO@ output in the rest of the world is not a real solution. China's CO2 output is going to rise, even with far more responsible policies. Same for India, and much of the developing world. The growth in CO2 output in those countries should lag GDP growth, rather than lead it, if there is to be any hope of slowing CO2 related climate change, but the current big producers of CO2 on a per capita basis (by this measure, the US still vastly outstrips China, or anybody else) need to cut back massively.

Given our performance so far, I think we are going to have far more tornados in December and substantially higher sea level before we get serious.

[Tom Womack]

Do the nations that industrialised in the 19th century have enough money to pay China the cost difference, and provide them the engineering expertise, to build nuclear power stations where each of their coal-fired power stations is planned?

It would not be cheap - China's planning a coal-fired power station a week, nuclear power stations are perhaps two billion Euros each, so it would cost about 10% of Germany's federal budget (equal to defence and education taken together).

But it would probably be cheaper than funding the absurdly ridiculous bits of infrastructure required to decarbonise the atmosphere from the output of power stations eight thousand kilometres away - concentrating gases is horribly expensive, extracting a billion tons of carbon from thirty trillion tons of atmosphere each year is an engineering problem we've not a clue how to handle.

Would you rather lose Hamburg to the sea or see a 10% increase in the federal income tax?