Re: Why do intelligent people reject science? (National Geographic article)
Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2018 5:06 am
So pleased to see you say that DWill, since as I mentioned at the recent thread on Changing People’s Minds, and as the opening post here explains regarding the tribal nature of belief, persuading anyone of anything is extraordinarily difficult and rare.DWill wrote:Robert has persuaded me that limiting warming to less-than-disastrous levels won't work without massive investment in removal technologies.
To recap on climate, we have added a lazy trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the air, preparing an earth-shattering kaboom, as Marvin might have put it. The climate orthodoxy of cutting emissions, as expressed in the recent IPCC report and this dubious Nobel to Nordhaus, says don’t worry about all that accumulated carbon, just slow down the speed at which we are adding more fuel to preparing this great bonfire of our vanities. The IPCC report goes so far as to say we can ignore major feasible methods to fix the climate just because some people don't like them on purely emotional grounds. That is pure tribality, a capitulation of reason to the mob.
Climate is a security emergency, not a second order political debate. The idea that the security emergency can be solved without active collaboration with the fossil fuel industry is a farcical tragic joke.
There is a serious opportunity cost in renewables. If our goal is climate stability and restoration, the funds and effort we invest for that purpose should be applied to the activities with greatest ecological rate of return. Unfortunately that is not renewables, which have been sold on the basis of lies. Wind and solar are great for pollution control but very slow as a way to stop our planet turning into a hothouse.DWill wrote:At the same time, though, renewables have to be aggressively increased, because it will take a few decades for carbon removal to be feasible at scale.
My view is that the single best opportunity is to conduct field trials on adding iron to the ocean, as I have explained at my new website ironsaltaerosol.com. Disturbingly, my experience is that I get the totschweigen wall of silence treatment from the renewables brigade. They can’t argue on facts so their preferred tactic is simply to ignore arguments that refute them, like the Pope arguing with Galileo.
Why do you say that? It is true that coal emits mercury which causes permanent damage, but the main permanent damage is caused by the temperature rise of climate change, especially biodiversity loss and the risk of several dangerous switches getting thrown that we don’t know about. The best way to stop those trigger points is by stepping back from the precipice by pulling carbon out of the air.DWill wrote:The damage that fossils will do in the meantime can't always be erased through later carbon removal.
The world has several hundred years of coal reserves, but as McKibben explained in his 2012 Rolling Stone article Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, burning the reserves that are factored into the stock prices of the fossil majors would send us on a one way trip to Venus hell, temperature-wise. The only way fossil fuels can avoid the Kodak corporate extinction fate is by working out how to remove more carbon than we add to the air, and using that removed carbon for productive commodities – fuel, food, feed, fertilizer, fabric, fish, forests. I still don’t have much of a sense that they realize the severity of the predicament.DWill wrote: One point that might be ignored is that, despite advanced oil and gas extraction methods, fossil fuels won't be in sufficient supply to maintain the enormous energy flows the world economy depends on. Renewables are needed for both environmental and economic reasons.
Growing algae on 1% of the world ocean, with high yield industrial production fertilized by emissions piped from coal fired power stations, would in my view enable a sustainable world economy and climate repair.