> What would be better would be to
> remove the original source of the problem; get the idiot to sit down,
> as it were.
As far as I can see, the primary reason for avoiding "anthropogenic
change" and believing that leaving things as they are is the safe
option, is the idea that climate has been decently stable for 10,000
years, and life supporting stable for hundreds of millions of years.
>From which it would follow that in the absence of anthropogenic
change, we'd hopefully have a decent chance of the climate staying
stable and life supporting, while any anthropogenic change might cause
trouble, possibly a lot of trouble, because we don't really understand
the Earth system.
I think this is probably the main point of Gavin's example. What
troubles me about that point is:
1. In the absence of a known mechanism, we don't know how to even put
a percentage risk on the danger. It might be negligible, it might be
90% probable. We just don't know and have no objective way of
telling.
We just argue that life has done well absent the disturbance for so
long it ought to continue doing well. And we don't know that with a
disturbance included, because the system is too complicated. Nor do we
know what the danger actually is.
2. The comparison with the past doesn't work, if something else has
changed in the system. This may be a factor that has allowed the
evolution of industrial society (for example, it might be that a long
period of evolution is required for industrial civilisation to get a
chance and out of trillions of planets like Earth, 99.99999% go the
way of Venus or Mars before an industrial civilisation ever gets up
and running).
3. And industrial society will change a lot of stuff by being present
on the planet, all of which might contribute to apocalypse, or
respectively attenuate it. Just changing one thing (say reducing
sulphate aerosol levels), while leaving another unchanged (say GHG's)
might be exactly what tips us over the edge.
4. Reference to unknown dangers with unknown causes and probabilities
makes rational decision making impossible.
Continuing from point 3, how do you assess whether an anthropogenic
change is significant, without knowing what the danger is, or how
likely it is, or what its causes and remedies are?
The argument that things went pretty well for thousands of years,
could therefore be applied to demand the cessation of industrial
society and a return to a population of less than a billion with all
recent technology abandoned.
But even then, it's not clear that the same probability applies as for
the last few hundreds of millions of years, after all we might already
be beyond the point of no return ..., lest we make some further
changes rather than go back to the stone age.
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