On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 11:14 AM, Edward K. Ream <[email protected]> wrote:
Bracevich is a well-respected commentator, and I agree with what he says. > Alas, he is talking to the wind. > One alternative to talking to the wind is talking to oneself ;-) At least that way I have some chance of convincing my interlocutor. Hehe. One reason why doing something about global warming or mass extinction is hard is that there *way *too many constraints. For example, economists typically consider growth to be essential. Alas, growth compounds CO2 emissions and stress on species. One way forward is to use disciplined magical thinking. This may reveal goals. As I see it, the world would be better off with maybe only a billion people. If all lived at the standard of living of the US, then perhaps the goals of E. O. Wilson's Half Earth <https://www.amazon.com/Half-Earth-Our-Planets-Fight-Life/dp/1631490826> might come to pass and the stress on species would be reduced. We may as well assume little or no CO2 emissions. But this is pure magic. By definition, the seven+ billion people alive today can be expected to live, on average, their typical lifespan. Events may drastically reduce that lifespan, but absent such horrors it would take 50 or more years of a *global *one-child policy to get the world back to 1 billion people. That isn't going to happen. Furthermore, as John Mauldin <http://www.mauldineconomics.com/about-us/john-mauldin> points out, declining populations create serious economic consequences, at least for present societies. Reducing population will face huge resistance from politicians and business leaders. Aside: There is a howling mistake in Bill McKibben's otherwise excellent piece <https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii> in the New Republic. "But would the Stanford plan be enough to slow global warming? Yes, says [Mark Z.] Jacobson: If we move quickly enough to meet the goal of 80 percent clean power by 2030, then the world’s carbon dioxide levels would fall below the relative safety of 350 parts per million by the end of the century." Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. This is a bathtub problem mistake. Reducing the rate at which water flows *into* a bathtub does not *lower *the level of the water! CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by weathering of rock, and iirc that process takes on the order of 10,000 years. See this page <http://www.skepticalscience.com/weathering.html> for more. Which just goes to show that people are notoriously bad at understanding rates of change. To do it properly requires calculus, and that's not a real strong suit among business leaders and politicians. Or with Bill McKibben, apparently. We won't get even to 400 ppm unless we learn how to *remove* CO2 from the atmosphere. That can be done, but it would take a huge amount of green energy. Only governments could fund such a project. It's not going to happen with climate deniers in control. In short, disciplined magical thinking (aka thought experiments) shows just how difficult the problems are. Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
