This time around said topic is Climate Change. Woo! Which given the range of positions I've occupied on the topic in the past should be interesting for me to write about, but hey, that's what makes this fun.
Okay. Let us start by defining the problem. I suspect most people think the problem's already pretty defined, but then, that's half the problem in debating any issue: whoever gets to it first makes up the terms of the debate and thus puts everyone's thinking - splut! - right in the box.
Let us start by admitting to ourselves what we really want to do, and why we really want to do it. We want the climate not to change, for sundry reasons, which boil down to (a) it changes the ecology and (b) it has really inconvenient side effects, like coastal cities becoming modern Atlantises.
And as we all know, or at least those of us who've ever looked at the big geological picture know, the climate varies all the damn time. Over the history of our lovely blue planet it has varied from the frigid chill of the Ice Age to the stinkin' tropical bogs of the Carboniferous Epoch, and for that matter, a good while ago, it varied so much that this wasn't a lovely blue planet, but rather a murky yellow-green planet whose atmosphere consisted largely of carbon dioxide and methane and other such yummy stuff. Party time for the prokaryotes, but nothing you'd care to live in.
Now, the interesting thing about that is that through all of those changes, the actual planet - by which I mean, for all the pedants out there, not merely the big ball of rock and mud, but also the planetary ecology, has muddled along just fine. Sure, the anaerobes had a pretty hard time when oxygen became the Next Big Thing, and the dinosaurs all died out, and there have been Ice Ages, and extinctions, and goodness knows what throughout the few billion years there's been an environment, but if you look at it in the large, well, the planet and life on it just keeps muddling along. And every time some shift in the climate comes along and whacks one form of life, nature comes back with three more freshly invented ones next week to suit the new climate.
(And, incidentally, we're nowhere near the hot end of the geological record. Just so you know.)
So, give up all thoughts of "saving the planet". It won't notice what we do, and it won't care, any more than it would notice or care if we just let everything run amuck. Forget about "fighting for nature". Nature doesn't give a crap, and would merely use the opportunity to come up with an awesome fish that likes hot water and plants that make their own shade. While you're at it, have done with "protecting the environment". Over the last few billion years it's shrugged off worse crap than anything humanity could do, even if we TRIED to destroy everything.
So. First point of honesty, here - we're, meaning the general we, not interested in preventing climate change here for the environment's sake, or because warming is particularly bad, per se. We're interested in preventing climate change because the Great Midwestern Desert and Coastal Floodening, or, for that matter, Ice Age 2: Glaciers Devour Canada Before Coming For US, is monumentally inconvenient for our nice, comfortable, human-civilization-y lives and some species we find useful. No-one wants to have to start importing wheat from Canada/Siberia, to move house because their old town is in the middle of a new desert/10 feet underwater, or to have to face the prospect of a million Third Worlders knocking at the door 'cause the same thing has happened to their entire country.
(Those blessed with empathy may also consider the potential for vast human suffering and the extinction of species which we, as humans, find cute/photogenic/interesting in some way - oh, come on, you know it's true. Everyone with a heart gets all weepy about the polar bears and the baby seals, but you know as well as I do that if the poster animal for climate-changed caused extinction was the sea cucumber or the banana slug, no-one but a few cranks would give a rat's ass.)
Having reconciled ourselves, then, to the essential self-centeredness of the whole exercise, and hopefully not been too put off by the Canute-like nature of attempting to stop the turning cycles of the world in their courses, let us consider next the question of anthropogenic climate change. So much of the arguing back and forth appears to be concerned with whether it is, or it isn't, caused by human action in one way or another. I'm going to adopt something of an iconoclastic position here: why give a damn?
Well, okay, yes, it is relevant when considering possible solutions. But with regard to whether we should do something about it or not, really, it's irrelevant. Just because we caused a thing doesn't mean we should have to fix it, not if its effects won't matter, and if we really are staring ZOMGWTFBBQ-scale disaster in the face, whether it's anthropogenic or solagenic or deigenic or freakin' Martian-lizard-genic hardly matters, because we're staring ZOMGWTFBBQ-scale disaster in the face! Unless you actually are one of the three cranks who feel morally obliged to sacrifice yourself to nature, just not to the feelthy works of man, but if you are, please understand that the other six billion of us don't want to do that today, thank you so very much.
Having thus dismissed that question, we then come on to the real question of the day, the Global Warming Debate. Not "is it anthropogenic", but "is it happening at all?". And yes, it is a debate, for the painfully simple reason that people are still debating it.
Well, on this question, I Take No Position. Frankly, inasmuch as the quality of the debate is about, say, Creationists arguing with GOSPLAN about this year's tractor-production statistics, I think "I Take No Position" is the only reasonable position for anyone not actively engaged in primary research to take, assuming they have some pretensions to intellectual integrity.
Because the only thing I have learnt, after hours and hours and days and days of reading through primary, secondary, and tertiary sources on the topic is that everyone lies like weasels for the good of the cause, misrepresents data, misrepresents what other people have said, makes extremely dubious use of statistics, and generally fudges the issue to suit what they want it to be.
Yes, I said everyone, AND I MEAN EVERYONE. Don't come yammering to me about the scientific consensus. I'm not some schmuck who missed philosophy of science class, I know that's not how science works, and you know it as well as I do. The scientific consensus pre-, during- and post-Wegener was that there was no such thing as continental drift, and yet they move. Don't come bleating to me about how the oil companies/Big Energy/the elite/the Republican Party/the Bavarian Illuminati/the Jews (And yes, I've heard all of those, except for the Bavarian Illuminati. Yet.) are bankrolling studies to serve their interests instead of the truth as if it was all one-sided. Public choice theory blew that one out of the water long ago, and if you don't believe that politicians and government regulators have self-interest in greatly expanding the scope of their control over the economy and daily life, well, then, keep taking the soma.
(Did you really think it was just a coincidence that, the Green fetish for alternative energy aside, the vast majority of the proposed political solutions to climate change are just coincidentally a grab-bag of a progressive statist's existing wet dreams?
One might also mention the way that these people love to cite the IPCC reports to demonstrate the existence of climate change, yet somehow they all fall silent when it comes to the economic portion of the IPCC report. Which report identifies the A1T economic model - summarized as 'capitalism, globalized, strong emphasis on market-based solutions' - of all the economic models they used in the study as the one which produces one of the lowest cumulative emissions while still growing the economy at the highest rate. Anyone think that's a coincidence? Granted, that may well have been knocked on the head by the recession, but it has nonetheless been the "scientific consensus" for over a decade. Intellectual dishonesty rampant.)
And yes, while I'm fairly confident most of you won't bother to verify this, while the climate change denial side has been caught fabricating data, distorting the evidence to fit their beliefs, and just plain practicing bad science, so too has the pro-climate change side. A couple of its proponents have even been unwise enough to go on record stating that a bit of falsified disasterbation is entirely justified if it makes the public Wake! Up! And! Take! Action! Now!
(I'm not terribly interested in arguing over a specific list of lies, which are many on both sides, so no, I'm not going to provide you with one. Google should suffice; most are well documented, and it's not my job to do your research for you. This is an opinion piece.)
But never mind that for now. While actually asserting the existence of climate change in the present is probably unwise, given the climate (sic) of intrigue and politicized deception, let us proceed arguendo on the assumption that it does exist. It is, after all, reasonably probable that this is correct, and therefore that something ought to be done about it to preserve our civilized asses. And, indeed, the comfort of our civilized asses, since very few of us would enjoy subsistence farming, however "green" it might be.
(It isn't, by the way.)
I shall now proceed to attack a couple of sacred cows. I shall begin with the notion of alternative energy...
...well, actually, no I won't. The need for an alternative energy source is pretty damned obvious, and would be there even if not for the climate. I shall, however, attack the notion of government subsidies for alternative energy - and, since this is a climate change post, I'm going to do so not on my regular economic grounds, but on the much simpler grounds that to do this with any effectiveness at all requires the government's experts to be able to predict the future, in order to know which approaches will work out before trying them.
Even if Cassandra were working for the Department of Energy, no-one would believe her.
And as the non-existence of the flying car, the lack of a pressing need to solve the problem of horse dung inundating the streets of New York, the lack of the Master Computer for the American Continent being cooled by the entire flow of the Colorado River, etc., demonstrates, the government experts - and, indeed, regular private-sector futurists and other would-be technocrats - are pretty bloody awful at predicting useful future solutions.
A bidding war over whose pet project gets funding - which, Congress being Congress, will mean "whose district" most of the time, committing money to political projects that it's too embarrassing to cancel, God-awful carbon-pessimizing side-effect-ridden boondoggles like corn biofuel, and various other ways of sucking capital away from whatever the eventual winner turns out to be does nothing but obstruct and distract the development process that will lead to whatever the eventual solution turns out to be.
The purpose of the various means of internalizing the emissions externality is to give the private sector an incentive to find ways of getting rid of said externality. Do that, and then leave it the hell alone.
Next, I'm going to go after the whole notion that we can solve the problem of climate change by cutting emissions. No, we can't. Really. I've nothing against cutting emissions, being generally not in favor of pollution, but seriously, people. Won't work.
Partly it won't work because the numbers just don't add up when you go beyond simple carbon-neutrality. I know that, and you know that too, and as soon as the requirements of extreme emissions-cutting become apparent to the general public, they'll know that too. But let that pass.
Here's your real problem: we're not alone in the world. Or rather, we have two real problems, and they're called China and India. And other not-yet-at-the-Western-lifestyle countries, too, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to these two. Together, they contain 2.5 billion people, somewhere between a half and a third of the entire population of the world.
And a large proportion of those people are dirt poor peasants.
But, thanks to the wonders of globalization, a lot of those dirt poor peasants have seen American television, even if only on the one shared television set in the village.
If you think telling rich, spoiled Westerners that their lifestyles have to be cut a little is hard to do - and it seems to be - imagine what it would be like to go back and live in the actual, genuine, Shit Age.
Now imagine that you're not telling this to rich, spoiled Westerners. Imagine that you're telling it to dirt-poor peasants who already live there, with the corollary being that the rich, spoiled Westerners are (a) getting to keep some of their stuff, and (b) are YOU. And they will never, ever, EVER get to stop living miserable subsistence-level lives or get any of that neat stuff they saw on television.
The governments of India and China have some experience with, um, popular revolts. They know what happens to governments that are stupid enough to tell their people that they're that screwed, especially at the behest of wealthy foreigners. And neither India nor China is governed by complete morons, so they're not going to tell their people that. They're going to tell us, the wealthy foreigners, "You first", which is exactly what they have been doing, knowing that there's almost no chance they'll have to follow through on it, and then even if we did, they'll turn around then and find some other excuse for not doing it.
And both China and India, this very large segment of the world's population, are sitting right on top of huge deposits of brown coal, which has the advantage of being real cheap and easy to turn into energy, coupled with the disadvantage of emitting CO2 (and other fun things like sulphur dioxide) all over the place.
So, not to put too fine a point on it, it doesn't matter a damn what the West does in re emissions, in real terms. We could abolish every form of energy generation more advanced than waterwheels and windmills tomorrow, and aside from most of us dying in the next few months, and it would have bugger all effect, because that coal is there, those people are determined to have the benefits of a modern, industrialized society, and short of blowing them right off the map, there is not one damn thing you, I, or anyone else can do about it.
So, what am I telling you you should do, I hear you cry? Pray for geoengineering, folks, and I'm not just saying that because I think orbital megastructures are awesome (although they are) or because it would revitalize our moribund space program (although it would), or even because building a giant orbital sunshade would solve future climate issues, such as global warming from waste heat, something that doesn't seem to be taken into account nearly as much as it ought to be, especially since the laws of thermodynamics tells us that you simply can't cut those emissions, period.
(Although it would have the tiny political flaw that a few design modifications would also make it a handy-dandy space weapon, suitable for melting entire cities into glass. Enh. Can't make an omelet...)
But it's time to seriously consider ideas like that and the other geoengineering concepts that have come up. And not just the megascale engineering; it's time to start thinking about regrowing wetlands and constructing flood barriers and replenishing aquifers and better redistributing water and moving people out of flood plains and generally doing all the tedious detail work of civil engineering needed to shape an infrastructure that can help us address the local consequences of climate change, and adapt to and ride out the ones we can't head off.
It's hard. It's unglamorous. Frankly, a lot of it is boring. And it doesn't let you sit in the limelight for spending billions of dollars of public money, preen yourself for being greener than your neighbors, or have all the jolly fun of ordering people around and tell them how to live their lives.
But it's also vital, 'cause if this thing's real, then it's coming right at us, and all the wishing and pretentious wankery in the world's not going to save us when it hits.
