Klimawandel?!

[NoWin]

vor 13 Stunden schrieb gerison:

@Nowin Ich glaub eigentlich, dass Du nur einen schlechten Tag hast und halt Freude hast, wenn sich die Leut mit Dir auseinandersetzen. Um die Sache geht es ja gar nicht.

 

Ich bin jetzt auch nicht stolz darauf, dass ich gleich mit einem argumentum ad personam an den Start gehen muss, aber ein argumentum ad rem, das du so vehement einforderst, interessiert Dich ja gar nicht, und wenn, dann nur, wenn es Deine "Meinung" stützt. So what? Das spannende hier ist ja nicht die Diskussion über den Klimawandel in der Sache selbst, sondern in welcher Art und Weise hier über den Klimawandel diskutiert wird. 

 

Die bloße Meinung eines Radfahrers aus Ö wird der Regierung in Bangladesh, Jakarta etc ziemlich am A** vorbei gehen, die sich Gedanken darüber machen muss, wie sie Millionen von Menschen von steigenden Meeresspiegel schützen müssen. Auch den Schweizer Eidgenossen wird egal sein, was Du zum Besten gibst, wenn diese Konzepte suchen, wie sie mit instabilen Gebirgsmassen durch den auftauenden Permafrostboden umgehen.

 

Sorry Nowin. Genau davon habe ich geschrieben, dass die Leute "Geld in die Hand" nehmen müssen und sich Qualitätsjournalismus leisten sollen. Beim nächsten Bike mal einfach eine Schaltgruppe weiter unten ansetzen und das gesparte Geld in ein "National Geographic" Abo investieren. Wahrscheinlich würde sich ein Abo für 8 bis 10 Jahre ausgehen und die Qualität von so manchem Posting signifikant verbessern. 

 

Wenn man ein Problem lösen will, muss man es erst mal akzeptieren. So wird das nix.

Ich bin bei dir, wenn es darum geht, dass es Qualitätsjournalismus geben sollte - ist aber zumindest in der DACH Region nicht mehr vorhanden.

Ansonsten habe ich eigentlich nur gute Tage, aber danke der Nachfrage 

[gerison]

vor 20 Minuten schrieb NoWin:

Passendes Beispiel: der stärkere Regen in New York und die dadurch ausgelösten Überschwemmungen sind einfach auf die völlig veraltete Infrastruktur bei Abwasserkanälen und Regenableitungen zurückzuführen.

Dein logischer Bruch besteht hier darin, dass es nicht in New York stärker regnet, weil die Infrastruktur veraltet ist.

 

Spoiler Alarm: Es ist der Klimawandel, der in NY für vermehrtes Regenaufkommen sorgt.

 

Why New York City Keeps Flooding https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/nyregion/nyc-sewer-system-infrastructure.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Bearbeitet 2. Oktober 2023 von gerison

[thingamagoop]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb ventoux:

Hast du falsch verstanden. Das war in Bezug auf " Noch dazu in Vielerlei Hinsicht" gemeint. Ausrotten abseits des Klimawandels. 

Stichwort "Atomare Aufrüstung"

Ah sorry dann. Wohl falsch gelesen beim nebenbei posten.... 😉

Bearbeitet 2. Oktober 2023 von thingamagoop

[AndiG65]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb NoWin:

Mir reicht es, die Modellierer der Covid-Jahre tagtäglich scheitern gesehen zu haben. 

 

In bestimmten, vielleicht sogar vielen, Bereichen wird man mit Modellierungen/mathematischen Vorhersagen/etc. schon so halbwegs oder auch genau die passenden Ergebnisse erzielen - aber die Natur läßt sich nicht in ein Schema pressen. Passendes Beispiel: der stärkere Regen in New York und die dadurch ausgelösten Überschwemmungen sind einfach auf die völlig veraltete Infrastruktur bei Abwasserkanälen und Regenableitungen zurückzuführen.

Beides stimmt halt nur, wenn man die Fakten ausblendet. Die Modellrechner sind zum Großteil immer richtig gelegen! Kann mich erinnern, dass ich einige Male recht beeindruckt war, wie Spitzen und dann auch wieder beginnende Abflachungen in den Kurven mehrere Wochen im Vorhinein zutreffendend vorausgesagt wurden. 

Und New York ist ein Beispiel, wo schon auch nie da gewesene Regenmengen aufgetreten sind. Und schau mal nach Griechenland  - liegts da auch an der Infrastruktur , dass das Wasser nach einem Monat immer noch nicht vollständig abgeflossen ist?

[gerison]

Eigentlich kann man diesen Thread zumachen. Die Skeptiker wird man in diesem Forum nicht mehr umdrehen und die Energie wäre in einer Diskussion über die Folgen und wie man diese mindert, besser aufgewendet.

 

 

[used_shoe]

das problem der eigentlich nicht mehr vorhandenen diskussions-kultur zieht sich halt durch alle gesellschaftspolitischen themen.

gefühlt besonders befeuert dadurch, dass die andere position einfach als grundsätzlich und vorsätzlich falsch angenommen wird. ich nehm mich da nicht ganz aus, auch wenn meine zynischen antworten meist durchaus beide seiten betreffen.

dass das vertrauen in wissenschaft allgemein auf einem (immer weiter sinkenden) tiefpunkt angekommen ist, und "spiritualität" und gefühlte wahrheiten eher vertraut wird als jahrelanger arbeit internationaler teams hilft halt auch nicht.

besonders kritisch wirds dann, wenn modelle oder vorhersagen mal nicht zutreffen, was ja im wissenschaftlichen kontext oftmals sogar erfreulich ist, weil dann das dementsprechende Thema erneut und verbessert aufgearbeitet wird: da kommt dann gleich die "die hatten schon wieder unrecht!" keule, während kein vertrauenswürdiger verfasser von studien jemals behaupten würde, dass jedes szenario zu 100% abgedeckt ist. hier muss man glaub ich tatsächlich auch der corona zeit ein großes maß an schuld geben, da vorhersagen/modelle/krisenpläne als 100% vertrauenswürdig verkauft wurden, was allerdings halt einfach der methodik geschuldet nicht richtig war.

worauf will ich hinaus? alle san deppat, ich kanns net ändern, die welt geht den bach hinunter aber die investoren sind glücklich.

[ventoux]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb AndiG65:

 Und schau mal nach Griechenland  - liegts da auch an der Infrastruktur , dass das Wasser nach einem Monat immer noch nicht vollständig abgeflossen ist?

Griechenland ist ja bekanntlich ein Vorzeigeland in Sachen Infrastruktur. 😜😝

[GrazerTourer]

vor 9 Minuten schrieb ventoux:

Griechenland ist ja bekanntlich ein Vorzeigeland in Sachen Infrastruktur. 😜😝

Wie kann man das alles überhaupt auf fehlende Infrastruktur schieben? Ja, die Folgen sind mal stärker mal weniger stark, wenn die Kanalisation geflutet wird und es zu viel versiegelten Boden gibt. Aber das ganze Wasser, das früher nie da war und jetzt auf einmal da ist, ist halt dennoch die Folge von der Klimaveränderung. 

 

Wenn man sich in einer Beziehung jahrelang nur bekriegt und schlägt, ist das Problem auch nicht, dass einer keinen Boxkurs hat... 😅

Bearbeitet 3. Oktober 2023 von GrazerTourer

[NoNick]

vor 34 Minuten schrieb used_shoe:

modelle

Die Modelle haben schon gestimmt nur  werden die ja nicht gemacht um anhand der Berechnung im wettbüro den grossen Gewinn einzusteigen, sondern bei unerwünschtem, errechneten Ergebnis (=viele Leute tot) rechtzeitig massnahmen zu setzen um das zu verhindern. Dann wird die erste Errechnung natürlich nimmer eintreten, war aber deshalb net falsch und die "Modelierer" net unfähig.

[NoWin]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb gerison:

Eigentlich kann man diesen Thread zumachen. Die Skeptiker wird man in diesem Forum nicht mehr umdrehen und die Energie wäre in einer Diskussion über die Folgen und wie man diese mindert, besser aufgewendet.

 

 

Dein Post zeigt deutlich die Tendenz der Belehrung durch die "richtige" Meinung. 

 

Erinnert mich an Leute, die lesbische Frauen "umdrehen" wollen. 

[romanski]

vor 41 Minuten schrieb ventoux:

Griechenland ist ja bekanntlich ein Vorzeigeland in Sachen Infrastruktur. 😜😝

Welches Vorzeigeland in Sachen Infrastruktur würde denn 1000 l/m² Niederschlag ohne größere Schäden wegstecken?

[used_shoe]

vor 18 Minuten schrieb NoNick:

Die Modelle haben schon gestimmt nur  werden die ja nicht gemacht um anhand der Berechnung im wettbüro den grossen Gewinn einzusteigen, sondern bei unerwünschtem, errechneten Ergebnis (=viele Leute tot) rechtzeitig massnahmen zu setzen um das zu verhindern. Dann wird die erste Errechnung natürlich nimmer eintreten, war aber deshalb net falsch und die "Modelierer" net unfähig.

genau auf das wollte ich hinaus.

[gerison]

@NoWin Erst schreibst einen absoluten Humbug und dann beschwerst Du Dich, dass Dich jemand darauf aufmerksam macht. Du kommst mir vor, wie ein Alkoholiker bei einer Intervention ohne Krankheitseinsicht. Dem kannst auch noch so viel erzählen, er wird es nicht glauben.

 

Aber das Board ist da für Dich.

 

 

 

 

[gerison]

 

 

nytimes.com

 

Why Smaller Storms Are Growing More Fearsome, More Often

Hilary Howard

5–6 Minuten

---

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

 

With Climate Change, Smaller Storms Are Growing More Fearsome, More Often

 

The Friday storm that produced vast flooding in New York City started out earlier in the week as an unremarkable — if unpredictable — weather system.

New Yorkers were taken by surprise Friday by the deluge of rain.Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times

Sign up for Your Places: Extreme Weather.  Get notified about extreme weather before it happens with custom alerts for places you choose.

At first, it looked as if New York would simply be grazed by light rain on Friday.

David Stark, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that earlier this week he was tracking what looked to be typical offshore weather. But on Wednesday night, a storm, which was supposed to stay south of the city and over the ocean, started to edge north, he said. And that changed everything.

The storm ended up joining forces with another low-pressure weather system coming in from the west. “Where they converged is where the heavy rain occurred,” he said. That just happened to be right over New York City. And “that is the nature of science sometimes,” he added.

 

It has been raining a lot in New York, which hasn’t seen a September this wet in over a century. Climate change is very likely stoking more ominous and lengthy downpours because as the atmosphere heats up, it can hold more moisture, said Andrew J. Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher who specializes in flash floods at Columbia Climate School at Columbia University.

This simple fact is the most probable explanation for why the Northeast has been so soggy, said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. “Low-pressure systems like nor’easters now have greater amounts of water vapor available to them,” he said. “And with a warmer Atlantic Ocean combining with warmer air, the atmosphere is primed to produce more rainfall.”

Image

With so much pavement in New York City, there are absorption problems when it comes to so much rain.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

But Friday’s weather was not your typically fierce coastal nor’easter or tropical storm, Mr. Carbin said. It was a result of “smaller-scale features, like bands of heavy rainfall and scattered thunderstorms,” he said.

These modest features are more “difficult to predict with any significant lead time,” he added. By Thursday, however, these smaller pieces had persuaded the National Weather Service to issue a flood watch, and by early Friday morning, stronger warnings.

Every storm is unique, he said. And although patterns within the atmosphere can look similar, “they are like human fingerprints; no two are alike.” The system that soaked New York City last weekend, for example, though unpleasant, didn’t produce flooding, and that was because of rainfall intensity, Mr. Carbin said.

“You can have a rainy day where you get less than a tenth of an inch per hour, but today’s rainfall was more than 10 times that amount,” he said.

And in a paved-over city with absorption problems, that makes all the difference.

Fall in the Northeast, when hurricane remnants and nor'easters increasingly come through, is prone to continuous, heavy rainfall, said Upmanu Lall, an engineering professor and the director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University. “If we just had a cloudburst during the summer, nothing much happens, because it’s possible to drain out,” he said.

But with climate change, sustained rainfall is now happening in the summer as well, if the recent downpours in July, and subsequent catastrophic flooding that struck parts of Vermont and the Hudson Valley, are any example.

And just as no two storms are alike, flooding also can vary, depending on whether it comes from the coast or the sky, Mr. Kruczkiewicz said.

“In New York City, when we think of coastal flooding, there are areas we know that are high risk,” he said. “But flash flooding has nothing to do with tides,” he said. “It’s coming from the sky and it’s driven by intense precipitation,” so flash floods can pop up anywhere there is poor drainage infrastructure.

“The water from flash floods tends to rise faster than any kind of flood,” Mr. Kruczkiewicz said. And when you add ailing infrastructure or poor drainage into the mix, he added, all bets are off.

 

 

 

 

 

[GrazerTourer]

vor einer Stunde schrieb NoWin:

Dein Post zeigt deutlich die Tendenz der Belehrung durch die "richtige" Meinung. 

Es gibt ka "richtige Meinung".

 

Das Klima is ka Meinung. Es gibt über Jahrhuhnderte Dokumentierte klimatische Bedingungen die perfekt mit dem korrelieren, was Modelle vorhergesagt haben und die Physik kannst mit einer Meinung a net überlisten. Zum Treibhauseffekt kannst ganz einfache Versuche mit Volksschülern machen, um zu sehen, was das ist. Und wenn ma den Kindern dazu sagt, dass wir durch die Erwärmung vieeeeel mehr Wasserdampf (=Energie) in der Atmoshpäre haben, kommen die auf das Probem sogar schon selbst drauf. Und wenn dann auch noch unfassbar geile Messungen existieren, wo Jetstreams in der Luft und Ströme im Meer genau ersichtlich sind, und die dann (abrakadabra) sogar noch mit Berechnungen zamm passen - was gibt's da noch zu "meinen"? es ist alles da. Daten und real life Ereignisse. Was gibt's da noch zu meinen? 

 

A Radl fällt a net plötzlich von der Erde runter, wenn ma die ganze Scheibe entlang geradelt ist. Das is a ka Meinung. 

 

 

vor einer Stunde schrieb NoWin:

Erinnert mich an Leute, die lesbische Frauen "umdrehen" wollen. 

Wenn man net an Wissenschaft glaubt, muss man meinen, dass lesbisch sein a Meinung ist, ja.

[gerison]

 

 

nytimes.com

 

Opinion | Climate Change Is Real. Markets, Not Governments, Offer the Cure.

Bret Stephens

37–47 Minuten

---

Opinion

Yes,
Greenland’s
Ice Is
Melting

 

A trip there changed my
mind about climate
change while reinforcing
my belief that markets,
not government, provide
the cure. A trip there changed my
mind about climate
change while reinforcing
my belief that markets,
not government, provide
the cure.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

ILULISSAT, Greenland — On a clear day in August, a helicopter set me and a few companions down on the northern end of the Jakobshavn Glacier in Western Greenland, about 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The ground under our feet seemed almost lunar: gray silt and dust, loose rocks and boulders, and, at the edge of the glacier’s face, mud so deep it nearly ate my boots. To the south, the calving front of the glacier known in Greenlandic as Sermeq Kujalleq periodically deposited enormous slabs of ice, some more than 100 feet high, into the open water.

I asked the pilot to give me a sense of how much the glacier had retreated since he had been flying the route. He pointed to a distant rocky island in the middle of the fjord.

“That’s where the glacier was in 2007,” he said.

Over the course of the 20th century, the Jakobshavn Glacier retreated about 10 to 15 kilometers. Over just the next eight years, it retreated about the same amount, according to the oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Later the front advanced a little — a function of complex dynamics partly involving ocean currents — before resuming its retreat.

For anyone who has entertained doubts about the warming of the planet, a trip to Greenland serves as a bracing corrective. Flying low over the vast ice sheet that covers most of the island, I immediately noticed large ponds of cerulean meltwater and dozens of fast-flowing streams rushing through gullies of white ice and sometimes disappearing into vertical ice caverns thousands of feet deep. Such lakes, scientists report, have become far more common over the last two decades, occurring earlier in the year at higher elevations. Last year, it even rained at the highest point of the ice sheet, some 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. That’s a first since record keeping began in the 1980s.

Closer to the coast, at the point where the sheet approaches the darkly colored mountains that ring the island, lies a distinctive, beige trimline of barren earth, ranging in width from hundreds to thousands of meters. Like the bathtub rings in the depleted lakes and reservoirs of the American West, it shows where the ice once reached, and how far it has receded. History also records that Greenland’s great 19th-century explorers — men like Fridtjof Nansen of Norway and Robert Peary of America — had to climb steep glacial walls merely to get onto the sheet itself. Now it is easy to spot places where the ice meets the dry land on flat ground.

And then there’s the testimony of the market.

In the coastal town of Ilulissat, I had dinner with Bo Møller Stensgaard, a geologist and the C.E.O. of Bluejay Mining, which plans to mine for copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc and ilmenite.

The receding of the ice sheet has opened additional land for exploration, Stensgaard said, and warmer weather has lengthened the season when ships can travel to the island without the risk of being frozen in. “I can put people in the field longer,” he said.

Having spent long months in tents doing geological fieldwork, he sees the transformation not just as an entrepreneur.

“I’ve seen glaciers disappear completely,” he said. “I’ve seen starving polar bears because of disappearing sea ice. These are personally disturbing changes.”

But, since the minerals he hopes to mine are critical for any future green-energy transition, climate change is creating opportunities in Greenland to address the reason it is melting.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

I had other doubts, too. It seemed hubristic, or worse, to make multitrillion-dollar policy bets based on computer models trying to forecast climate patterns decades into the future. Climate activists kept promoting policies based on technologies that were either far from mature (solar energy) or sometimes actively harmful (biofuels).

Expensive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and North America seemed particularly fruitless when China, India and other developing countries weren’t about to curb their own appetite for fossil fuels. There was also a millenarian fervor that bothered me about climate activism, with its apocalyptic imagery (the Statue of Liberty underwater) and threats of doom unless we were willing to live far more frugally.

That was my frame of mind when, in April 2017, I wrote my first column for The Times, “Climate of Complete Certainty.” The blowback was intense. Climate scientists denounced me in open letters; petitions were circulated demanding that I be fired. The response mainly hardened my conviction that climate activists were guilty of precisely what I charged them with: intellectual self-certainty that is often a prescription for disaster.

Among the signatories of one petition was an oceanographer, John Englander, who runs an educational and advocacy group, the Rising Seas Institute. Two years later, on a visit to New York, he wrote me out of the blue and asked to meet. Unlike most of my detractors, his note was so cordial that it seemed churlish to say no. We met the next day.

Englander is a trim, affable and eloquent man of 72 who once ran the Cousteau Society and reminds me of a bearded Patrick Stewart, albeit with an American accent. His pitch was simple: The coastline we have taken for granted for thousands of years of human history changed rapidly in the past on account of natural forces — and would soon be changing rapidly and disastrously by man-made ones. A trip to Greenland, which holds one-eighth of the world’s ice on land (most of the rest is in Antarctica) would show me just how drastic those changes have been. Would I join him?

Again, it seemed churlish to say no (though the pandemic would delay my trip by two years). More to the point, if my main objection to the climate activists was my impression of their overweening certitude, didn’t it behoove me to check my own? Where — except in the risk of changing my mind — was the harm in testing my views?

But we need to recognize
clean energy’s limitations. But we need to
recognize clean energy’s
limitations.

From a jetliner, the most striking features of Greenland seem to be its vastness and its blankness, which put me in mind of a line from Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places”: “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/With no expression, nothing to express.” It was only when I got to the sheet itself that I realized the line could not be less apt. Trapped in the whiteness was a story about the world’s distant past and potential future.

Greenland is about the size of Alaska and California combined and, except at its coasts, is covered by ice that in places is nearly two miles thick. Even that’s only a fraction of the ice in Antarctica, which is more than six times as large. But the Arctic is warming at nearly four times the global average, meaning Greenland’s ice also poses a nearer-term risk because it is melting faster. If all its ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise by some 24 feet. That would be more than enough to inundate hundreds of coastal cities in scores of nations, from Jakarta and Bangkok to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Miami and New Orleans.

But just how fast is Greenland’s ice melting right now? Is this an emergency for our time, or is it a problem for the future?

Measuring ice loss on scales so vast is no easy task, since Greenland, like a spendthrift billionaire, is both constantly accumulating and shedding almost unfathomable quantities of ice over long spans of time. But scientists have been drilling ice-core samples from Greenland for decades, giving them a very good idea of climatic changes stretching back thousands of years. Better yet, a pair of satellites that detect anomalies in Earth’s gravity fields has been taking measurements of the sheet regularly for nearly 20 years, giving scientists a much more precise idea of what is happening.

The data shows unmistakably that Greenland’s ice is not in balance. It is losing far more than it is gaining.

From April 2002 to July 2022, Greenland has lost more than 5,000 gigatons of ice to the ocean

250 miles

Greenland

Ice mass change

relative to 2002

+0.5

no change

–1

–2

–3

–4

–5 meters of ice

Source: NASA

In Copenhagen before my departure for Greenland, I chatted with Liam Colgan, a Canadian research climatologist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “We haven’t had a good positive mass balance year since the late 1990s,” he told me in a follow-on email when I asked him to explain the data for me. The losses can vary sharply by year. The annualized average over the past 30 years, he added, is 170 gigatons per year. That’s the equivalent of about 5,400 tons of ice loss per second. That “suggests that Greenland ice loss has been tracking the I.P.C.C. worse-case, highest-carbon-emission scenario.” (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the U.N. body that assesses climate change.)

Still, it’s hard to forecast with any precision what that means. “Anyone who says they know what the sea level is going to be in 2100 is giving you an educated guess,” said NASA’s Willis. “The fact is, we’re seeing these big ice sheets melt for the first time in history, and we don’t really know how fast they can go.”

His own educated guess: “By 2100, we are probably looking at more than a foot or two and hopefully less than seven or eight feet. But we are struggling to figure out just how fast the ice sheets can melt. So the upper end of range is still not well known.”

On the face of it, that sounds manageable. Even if sea levels rise by eight feet, won’t the world have nearly 80 years to come to grips with the problem, during which technologies that help us mitigate the effects of climate change while adapting to its consequences are likely to make dramatic advances? Won’t the world — including countries that today are poor — become far richer and thus more capable of weathering the floods, surges and superstorms?

But we’ve gotten better at
mitigating climate disasters. But we’ve gotten
better at mitigating
climate disasters.

Englander isn’t at all sanguine. The average rate at which sea level is rising around the world, he estimates, has more than tripled over the past three decades, to five millimeters a year from 1.5 millimeters. That may still seem minute, yet as the world learned during the pandemic, exponential increases have a way of hitting hard.

“When something is on a straight line or a smooth curve, you can plot its trajectory,” Englander said. “But sea level, like earthquakes and mudslides, is something that happens irregularly and can change rather quickly and surprise us. The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.”

Another major wild card is Antarctica, where the average rate of ice mass loss is more than 150 gigatons a year. Shortly after I returned from Greenland, a glacier in West Antarctica called Thwaites, roughly the size of Florida, caught the world’s attention when a study suggested it was, according to a co-author, Robert Larter of the British Antarctic Survey, “holding on today by its fingernails.”

Or was that alarmist? In The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, where I used to work, the theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, a former under secretary for science in the Obama administration’s Energy Department, cast doubt on the threat from Thwaites in a voice that could have once been mine. He also thinks the risks associated with Greenland’s melting are less a product of human-induced global warming than of natural cycles in North Atlantic currents and temperatures, which over time have a way of regressing to the mean.

“Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as ‘just weather,’” he wrote in February.

Another climate nonalarmist is Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I call Pielke a nonalarmist rather than a skeptic because he readily acknowledges that the challenges associated with climate change, including sea-level rise, are real, serious and probably unstoppable, at least for many decades.

But that is also the source of his (relative) optimism. “If we have to have a problem,” he told me when I reached him by phone, “we probably want one with a slow onset that we can see coming. It’s not like an asteroid coming from space.”

Among Pielke’s areas of expertise is the analysis of long-term trends in weather and climate-related disasters. Even as the nominal cost of hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts has grown, the economic impact of these disasters relative to the overall size of the economy continues to fall, a function of better forecasting, infrastructure, planning and responsiveness when disaster strikes — all of which, in turn, are the result of the massive increase in wealth the world has enjoyed in the past century.

“Since the 1940s, the impact of floods as a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product has dropped by 70 percent-plus,” Pielke said. “We see this around the world, across phenomena. The story is that fewer people are dying and we are having less damage proportional to G.D.P.”

A considerable amount of data bears Pielke out. In the 1920s, the estimated average annual death toll from natural catastrophes around the globe averaged more than 500,000 a year. The 1931 China floods alone killed as many as four million people not only through drowning but also by exposure, disease and famine. A more recent example, the 1970 Bhola cyclone, killed as many as half a million people in what is now Bangladesh.

In the 2010s, the annual average death toll was below 50,000 — a tenth of what it was a century ago. Hurricane Ian, among the strongest storms ever to hit Florida, had a death toll of at least 119, a small fraction of the 8,000 believed killed by the Great Galveston hurricane of 1900

Even the poorest countries, while still unacceptably vulnerable, are suffering far fewer human and economic losses to climate-related disasters.

Global warming is real and getting worse, Pielke said, yet still it’s possible that humanity will be able to adapt to, and compensate for, its effects.

The death rate from natural disasters has fallen globally

Average number of deaths per 100,000 people, by decade

Source: EM-DAT Note: Natural disasters include all geophysical, meteorological and climate events like earthquakes, volcanic activity, landslides, drought, wildfires, storms and flooding.

Or maybe not. A few years ago, I would have found voices like Koonin’s and Pielke’s persuasive. Now I’m less sure. What intervened was a pandemic.

Just as I had once scoffed at the idea of climate doom, I had also, for almost identical reasons, dismissed predictions of another catastrophic pandemic on a par with the 1918-20 influenza outbreak. After all, hadn’t we pushed through previous alarms involving Ebola, SARS, MERS and vCJD (mad cow disease) without immense loss of life? Hadn’t virology, epidemiology, public hygiene, drug development and medicine all come a long way since the end of World War I, rendering comparisons with past pandemics mostly moot?

That’s what I thought until the spring of 2020, when, along with everyone else, I experienced how swiftly and implacably nature can overwhelm even the richest and most technologically advanced societies. It was a lesson in the sort of intellectual humility I recommended for others and began to realize I could use more of myself.

It was also a lesson in thinking about risk, especially those in the category known as high-impact, low-probability events that seem to be hitting us with such regularity in this century: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011, the mass upheavals in the Arab world that began with a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation.

Here were some questions that gnawed at me: What if the past does nothing to predict the future? What if climate risks do not evolve gradually and relatively predictably but instead suddenly soar uncontrollably? How much lead time is required to deal with something like sea-level rise? How do we weigh the risks of underreacting to climate change against the risks of overreacting to it?

I called Seth Klarman, one of the world’s most successful hedge-fund managers, to think through questions of risk. While he’s not an expert on climate change, he has spent decades thinking deeply about every manner of risk. He’s also one of the rare people with a capacity to change his mind — including, he readily acknowledges, about climate risk. “I’ve talked to so many experts and seen so much evidence,” he told me over Zoom, “I’m convinced the climate is changing, and addressing climate change has become a philanthropic priority of mine.”

“If you face something that is potentially existential,” he explained, “existential for nations, even for life as we know it, even if you thought the risk is, say, 5 percent, you’d want to hedge against it.”

How?

“One thing we try to do,” he said, “is we buy protection when it’s really inexpensive, even when we think we may well not need it.” The forces contributing to climate change, he noted, echoing Englander, “might be irreversible sooner than the damage from climate change has become fully apparent. You can’t say it’s far off and wait when, if you had acted sooner, you might have dealt with it better and at less cost. We have to act now.”

In other words, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s particularly true if climate change is akin to cancer — manageable or curable in its earlier stages, disastrous in its later ones.

For Klarman, the simplest and most obvious climate hedge is a carbon tax. By “raising the price of oil, gas and coal to make alternative energy more economically attractive,” he said, “capitalists will be incentivized to act.”

Klarman recognizes that such a tax is easier said than done because, if it’s enacted by only a few nations, it becomes more of a form of virtue signaling than a serious climate change policy. Carbon taxes also tend to impose their burdens inequitably, favoring city dwellers over exurban and rural ones, knowledge businesses over manufacturers.

There’s a reason Barack Obama rejected a carbon tax, knowing it could be deeply unpopular among voters, and why France’s carbon tax sparked the “yellow vest” public revolt that has energized the far right.

As I’ve always believed, knowing there is grave risk to future generations — and expecting current ones to make immediate sacrifices for it — defies most of what we know about human nature. So I began to think more deeply about that challenge, and others.

But we need to accept economic
growth as a benefit. But we need to
accept economic growth
as a benefit.

When I had dinner with Stensgaard, the mining executive, he mentioned a statistic that stunned me. For the world to achieve the net-zero goal for carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, we will have to mine, by 2040, six times the current amounts of critical minerals — nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, chromium, rare earths and other minerals and elements — needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels. And we will almost certainly have to do it from sources other than Russia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places that pose unacceptable strategic, environmental or humanitarian risks.

To bring carbon emissions to net zero, the world needs significantly more minerals

Global demand for minerals like copper, nickel, lithium and graphite, by type of clean energy

Source: International Energy Agency

That should be great news for people like Stensgaard — provided Greenlanders are willing to go along. Across the iceberg-strewn bay from where we dined lies Disko Island, twice the size of Long Island and home to around 1,000 people. According to Stensgaard, it is believed to contain 12 million to 16 million tons of nickel. To put that figure in perspective, Stensgaard told me that according to one estimate, the Norilsk nickel mine in Russia, one of the largest in the world, has produced about 8.3 million tons since the 1940s.

A world committed to net zero will need many more Disko Islands to supply its “clean” energy needs. I put the word “clean” in quotation marks because the term is a misnomer. As in everything else in life, so too with the environment: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Whether it’s nuclear, biofuels, natural gas, hydroelectric or, yes, wind and solar, there will always be serious environmental downsides to any form of energy when used on a massive scale. A single industrial-size wind turbine, for instance, typically requires about a ton of rare earth metals as well as three metric tons of copper, which is notoriously destructive and dirty to mine.

Just as significantly, as I’ve long believed, no “clean energy” solution will easily liberate us from our overwhelming and, for now, inescapable dependence on fossil fuels.

But we need solutions that
align with human nature. But we need
solutions that align with
human nature.

Nobody brings the point home better than Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose most recent book, “How the World Really Works,” should be required reading for policymakers and anyone else interested in a serious discussion about potential climate solutions.

Many people tend to think of fossil fuels mostly in terms of transportation, electrical generation and heating. But how often do we consider the necessity of fossil fuels in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, without which, Smil noted, “it would be impossible to feed at least 40 percent and up to 50 percent of today’s nearly eight billion people”? It’s difficult to imagine modern life without plastics, made mainly from the hydrocarbons ethylene and propylene, or steel, made with coking coal and natural gas, or cement or asphalt.

Some critics respond to Smil’s arguments with a type of heroic optimism that borders on magical thinking. Why, they ask, can’t we do more to grow our food organically and distribute and consume it locally? The only way we could do that and make a meaningful difference for the climate is if millions of us returned to farming, while accepting a world that can feed far fewer people. Or they cheer investments in wind and solar power without adequately considering that merely increasing the supply of renewable energy does very little to diminish a continued overall demand for fossil fuels, because we have yet to solve the intermittence problem: The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, and we haven’t figured out how to store extra energy at the necessary scale.

The poster child for this kind of magical thinking is Germany, which undertook a historic Energiewende — “energy revolution” — only to come up short. At the turn of the century, Germany got about 85 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels. Now it gets about 78 percent, a puny reduction, considering that the country has spent massive sums on renewables to increase the share of electricity it generates from them.

What went wrong? Many things, not least Angela Merkel’s abrupt decision to shut down all of Germany’s nuclear power plants right after the Fukushima disaster of 2011. That forced Germany to lean more heavily on coal, foreign oil and gas. Now Germany faces a winter with the prospect of uncertain energy supplies from its former partners in Moscow.

Things could turn a corner once scientists finally figure out a technical solution to the energy storage problem. Or when governments and local actors get over their NIMBYism when it comes to permitting and building a large energy grid to move electricity from Germany’s windy north to its energy-hungry south. Or when thoughtful environmental activists finally come to grips with the necessity of nuclear energy — one of the few energy sources, along with hydroelectric power, that combine reliability, energy density and no direct carbon emissions.

Till then, even as I’ve come to accept the danger we face, I think it’s worth extending the cancer metaphor a little further: Just as cancer treatments, when they work at all, can have terrible side effects, much the same can be said of climate treatments: The gap between an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment remains dismayingly wide. The problem has become clearer to me; the solution hasn’t.

But we need to avoid
alarmist activism. But we need to avoid
alarmist activism.

Maybe, I realized, in assessing my newfound concerns about climate change, my long-held beliefs might provide a solution — look to the market.

The way we’ve dealt with other vast and persistent problems provides some lessons.

For many decades, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies, foreign and domestic, pumped trillions of dollars into some of the world’s poorest countries, with ingenious development schemes that fell apart on contact with local realities. The developing world got stuck in debt traps, aid-fueled corruption and debilitating cycles of dependency.

Only when countries like Vietnam and China turned to a different model, of largely bottom-up, market-driven development, did hundreds of millions of people get lifted out of destitution.

Or consider another remarkable fact noted by Smil: In the United States, the difference between total water consumption in 1965 and 2015 is less than 4 percent. In the same span of time, population grew by more than 60 percent.

Laws, regulations and growing environmental awareness played important roles. So did increasing urbanization: More people living in apartments means fewer lawns that need to be watered.

But the most important transformation has come in agriculture, which uses about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater supply.

Farmers gradually adopted sprinkler and drip irrigation systems, rather than more wasteful flood irrigation, not to conserve water but because the technology provided higher crop yields and larger profit margins.

But the market, not the state,
will solve the problem. But the market,
not the state, will solve
the problem.

Water shortages “will spur a revolutionary, aggressive approach to getting rid of flood irrigation,” said Seth Siegel, the chief sustainability officer of the Israeli AgTech company N-Drip. “Most of this innovation will be driven by free-market capitalism, with important incentives from government and NGOs.”

Despite noble intentions, climate-change action has too often involved top-down plans with grandiose ambitions and poor execution.

There was a time when Al Gore was emphatically in favor of ethanol, support that George W. Bush later made his own through the 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard. It is now widely acknowledged to be an unmitigated failure, costing billions in regulatory compliance, but unkillable because of its popularity with farm-state politicians. Cap-and-trade systems were once touted as a market-friendly way to control carbon dioxide emissions. Yet from Europe to California to the agencies of the U.N., bureaucrats and industry have consistently found ways to game or corrupt the trading of emissions permits. The 2015 Paris Agreement that the Biden administration rejoined with such fanfare sets highly ambitious targets for greenhouse gas reductions that burnish the environmental credentials of the governments that sign it. But the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and the idea that countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and India (which is growing more — not less — dependent on coal) are going to meet their stated emissions targets is fanciful to the point of absurdity.

Yet meaningful environmental progress has been made through market forces. In this century, America’s carbon dioxide emissions across fuel types have fallen to well below 5,000 million metric tons per year, from a peak of about 6,000 million in 2007, even as our inflation-adjusted G.D.P. has grown by over 50 percent and total population by about 17 percent.

Renewables, particularly wind power, played a role. So did efficiency mandates.

Yet the biggest single driver in emissions reductions from 2005 to 2017 was the switch from coal to natural gas for power generation, since gas produces roughly half the carbon dioxide as coal. This, in turn, was the result of a fracking revolution in the past decade, fiercely resisted by many environmental activists, that made the United States the world’s largest gas producer. As with nuclear power, fracking carries real environmental risks (including methane emissions) that can’t be ignored. But anyone interested in useful solutions that significantly reduce emissions without incurring huge costs needs to not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

In the long run, we are likelier to make progress when we adopt partial solutions that work with the grain of human nature, not big ones that work against it. Sometimes those solutions will be legislative — at least when they nudge, rather than force, the private sector to move in the right direction. But more often they will come from the bottom up, in the form of innovations and practices tested in markets, adopted by consumers and continually refined by use. They may not be directly related to climate change but can nonetheless have a positive impact on it. And they probably won’t come in the form of One Big Idea but in thousands of little ones whose cumulative impacts add up.

On my last night in Greenland I took an evening boat ride through the enormous icebergs that had pushed their way out of the Ilulissat Icefjord and were now beginning to float free in the deep waters of Disko Bay. It is generally believed that one such iceberg made its way from the bay to a spot in the North Atlantic where it met the R.M.S. Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank it. It’s easy to get carried away with a metaphor, but it was hard not to think that Greenland could produce a similarly awful surprise, on a vastly greater scale, for an overconfident civilization that can’t bring itself to prepare adequately for the unthinkable moment when it could suddenly founder.

Except we are not that civilization.

The problem with our civilization isn’t overconfidence. It’s polarization, paralysis and a profound lack of trust in all institutions, including the scientific one (another pandemic-era lesson). Devising effective climate policies begins with recognizing the reality of the social and political landscape in which all policy operates. Some thoughts on how we might do better:

1) Engagement with critics is vital. Insults and stridency are never good tools of persuasion, and trying to cow or censor climate skeptics into silence rarely works. Englander got a lot further with me by saying, “Let’s talk,” than by signing a letter saying, in effect, “Shut up.” I too might have spared myself the outraged reception to my first column if it hadn’t been preceded by the name-calling of my old columns — such as when I called climate activists “a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate.”

2) Separate facts from predictions and predictions from policy. Global warming is a fact. So is the human contribution to it. So are observed increases in temperature and sea levels. So are continued increases if we continue to do more of the same. But the rate of those increases is difficult to predict even with the most sophisticated computer modeling. The scientific establishment would do more to enhance trust if it communicated what it isn’t sure of — like the relation between climate change and specific extreme weather events — as much as what it is. It would enhance it even further if climate scientists did not use the authority of their field to push for policies whose economic, political and social implications they might not fully understand.

3) Don’t allow climate to become a mainly left-of-center concern. One reason the topic of climate has become so anathema to many conservatives is that so many of the proposed solutions have the flavor, and often the price tag, of old-fashioned statism. But climate is a universally shared good and ought to be a truly common interest. Conservatives can do a lot more to develop their own set of realistic policy prescriptions (for instance, expedited permitting and tax breaks for next-generation nuclear energy). But first, many of them have to be brought around, as I was this year, about the need for action.

The conservative movement
needs to set an example for its children
and prepare for the future. The conservative
movement needs to
set an example
for its children and
prepare for the
future.

4) Be honest about the nature of the challenge. Talk of an imminent climate catastrophe is probably misleading, at least in the way most people understand “imminent.” A continual drumbeat of alarm may do more to exhaust voters than it will to rouse them. A more accurate description of the challenge might be a “potentially imminent tipping point,” meaning the worst consequences of climate change can still be far off but the end of our ability to reverse them is drawing near. Again, the metaphor of cancer — never safe to ignore and always better to deal with at Stage 2 than at Stage 4 — can be helpful.

5) Be humble about the nature of the solutions. The larger the political and financial investment in a “big fix” response to climate change on the scale of the Energiewende, the greater the loss in time, capital and (crucially) public trust when it doesn’t work as planned. Sometimes it pays to think small. As Smil noted, we can also do a lot of good by requiring triple-pane windows and proper insulation to make homes that are often likely to stand for 100 years vastly more energy efficient in cold winters and hot summers. A shift away from S.U.V.s — the ubiquity of which is a perverse outgrowth of 1970s-era fuel efficiency standards that created exemptions for light trucks — would be another quiet but major advance.

6) Begin solving problems our great-grandchildren will face. Start with sea-level rise: We cannot move Miami or Kolkata anytime soon, if ever. But we can act immediately to preserve more of our shoreline from further development and urbanization. We can also stop providing incentives for building in flood-prone areas by raising the price of federal flood insurance to reflect the increased risk more accurately.

7) Stop viewing economic growth as a problem. Industrialization may be the leading cause of climate change. But we cannot and will not reverse it through some form of deindustrialization, which would send the world into poverty and deprivation. Instead, economic growth should be seen as an ally in the fight against climate change, because it creates both the wealth that can mitigate the effects of climate change and the technological innovation needed to address its causes. That’s especially true of poorer countries, for which foreign investment, free trade, market-oriented reforms and good regulatory frameworks will do more to build climate resilience than additional billions in foreign aid.

😎 Get serious about the environmental trade-offs that come with clean energy. You cannot support wind farms but hinder the transmission lines needed to bring their power to the markets where they are needed. You cannot support wind farms but sue to block them in places where they might block your view of Nantucket Sound. You cannot support wind farms but support environmental regulations that make mining for rare earths in the United States unprofitable and send the industry to China (where meaningful regulations are effectively nonexistent). And you cannot cheer U.S. reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but oppose the fracking revolution in natural gas that helped bring it about.

9) A problem for the future is, by its very nature, a moral one. A conservative movement that claims to care about what we owe the future has the twin responsibility of setting an example for its children and at the same time preparing for that future. The same prudential logic that applies to personal finances, business decisions, Social Security, the federal debt or other risks to financial solvency should dictate thoughtful policies when it comes to climate.

I arrived in Greenland thinking about Robert Frost’s “Desert Places.” When I left, the verses I had in mind were from “God’s Grandeur,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that my father had me memorize as a boy:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

More on climate change

 

 

[gerison]

So, das war es für mich in diesem Thread. Ich hoff, die NYT kündigt mich net, wenn ich die Artikel hier poste. Sind leider hinter einer paywall.

 

Ich muss jetzt wieder ins Kinderradlforum rüber. Wenn meinem kleinen 5 min vor dem Rennen in zwei Wochen wieder die Schaltung eingeht, redet der mit mir gar nix mehr. Der is da kompromissloser als der NoWin.

Bearbeitet 3. Oktober 2023 von gerison

[NoDoc]

Ach was, demnächst explodiert eh der Vesuv und dann ist das mit der Klimaerwärmung eh schon wieder Schnee von morgen. 

 

Italien zittert vor Ausbruch des Supervulkans (msn.com)

Bearbeitet 3. Oktober 2023 von NoDoc

[madeira17]

Klimawandel ist keine Meinung sondern Fakt.

Welche Maßnahmen man setzen kann und soll, darüber kann man eine Meinung haben.

[graveloso_marveloso]

vor 4 Minuten schrieb madeira17:

Klimawandel ist keine Meinung sondern Fakt.

Welche Maßnahmen man setzen kann und soll, darüber kann man eine Meinung haben.

Wir werdens erst glauben, wenn's aus ist. Meine Meinung. 

[BikeBär]

vor 3 Stunden schrieb gerison:

Eigentlich kann man diesen Thread zumachen. Die Skeptiker wird man in diesem Forum nicht mehr umdrehen und die Energie wäre in einer Diskussion über die Folgen und wie man diese mindert, besser aufgewendet.

Ich würde es so sagen: im Sinne der etwas provokant formulierten Einstiegs-Umfrage sehe ich keinen Diskussionsbedarf mehr, vielleicht kann man die wegtun, aber den Fred behalten.

Denn die im zweiten Teil Deines Satzes gemeinte Diskussion findet hier eh statt.

Da gibt's auch immer wieder unterschiedliche Auffassungen, die mehr oder weniger ausdiskutiert werden (jedenfalls Argumente ausgetauscht), und das möchte ich nicht missen. Denn Skeptiker sind nicht gleich Leugner. Man kann skeptisch ggü. einzelner Dinge sein, ohne die grundlegenden Fakten zu ignorieren.

 

Die Ausnahmen (im Moment seh ich eigentlich nur einen), die schon die Existenz des Klimawandels leugnen, werden wir aushalten. Ich hab mich dazu diese Woche eh einmal ausführlich geäußert, damit is dieser konkrete Fall für mich aber auch im Wesentlichen abgeschlossen, wird bestmöglich ignoriert und ich wende mich wieder den oben erwähnten interessanten Aspekten des Themas zu.

[ventoux]

vor 4 Stunden schrieb gerison:

 

 

nytimes.com

 

Opinion | Climate Change Is Real. Markets, Not Governments, Offer the Cure.

Bret Stephens

37–47 Minuten

---

Opinion

Yes,
Greenland’s
Ice Is
Melting

 

A trip there changed my
mind about climate
change while reinforcing
my belief that markets,
not government, provide
the cure. A trip there changed my
mind about climate
change while reinforcing
my belief that markets,
not government, provide
the cure.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

Yes, Greenland’s ice
is melting.

ILULISSAT, Greenland — On a clear day in August, a helicopter set me and a few companions down on the northern end of the Jakobshavn Glacier in Western Greenland, about 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The ground under our feet seemed almost lunar: gray silt and dust, loose rocks and boulders, and, at the edge of the glacier’s face, mud so deep it nearly ate my boots. To the south, the calving front of the glacier known in Greenlandic as Sermeq Kujalleq periodically deposited enormous slabs of ice, some more than 100 feet high, into the open water.

I asked the pilot to give me a sense of how much the glacier had retreated since he had been flying the route. He pointed to a distant rocky island in the middle of the fjord.

“That’s where the glacier was in 2007,” he said.

Over the course of the 20th century, the Jakobshavn Glacier retreated about 10 to 15 kilometers. Over just the next eight years, it retreated about the same amount, according to the oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Later the front advanced a little — a function of complex dynamics partly involving ocean currents — before resuming its retreat.

For anyone who has entertained doubts about the warming of the planet, a trip to Greenland serves as a bracing corrective. Flying low over the vast ice sheet that covers most of the island, I immediately noticed large ponds of cerulean meltwater and dozens of fast-flowing streams rushing through gullies of white ice and sometimes disappearing into vertical ice caverns thousands of feet deep. Such lakes, scientists report, have become far more common over the last two decades, occurring earlier in the year at higher elevations. Last year, it even rained at the highest point of the ice sheet, some 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. That’s a first since record keeping began in the 1980s.

Closer to the coast, at the point where the sheet approaches the darkly colored mountains that ring the island, lies a distinctive, beige trimline of barren earth, ranging in width from hundreds to thousands of meters. Like the bathtub rings in the depleted lakes and reservoirs of the American West, it shows where the ice once reached, and how far it has receded. History also records that Greenland’s great 19th-century explorers — men like Fridtjof Nansen of Norway and Robert Peary of America — had to climb steep glacial walls merely to get onto the sheet itself. Now it is easy to spot places where the ice meets the dry land on flat ground.

And then there’s the testimony of the market.

In the coastal town of Ilulissat, I had dinner with Bo Møller Stensgaard, a geologist and the C.E.O. of Bluejay Mining, which plans to mine for copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc and ilmenite.

The receding of the ice sheet has opened additional land for exploration, Stensgaard said, and warmer weather has lengthened the season when ships can travel to the island without the risk of being frozen in. “I can put people in the field longer,” he said.

Having spent long months in tents doing geological fieldwork, he sees the transformation not just as an entrepreneur.

“I’ve seen glaciers disappear completely,” he said. “I’ve seen starving polar bears because of disappearing sea ice. These are personally disturbing changes.”

But, since the minerals he hopes to mine are critical for any future green-energy transition, climate change is creating opportunities in Greenland to address the reason it is melting.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

I had other doubts, too. It seemed hubristic, or worse, to make multitrillion-dollar policy bets based on computer models trying to forecast climate patterns decades into the future. Climate activists kept promoting policies based on technologies that were either far from mature (solar energy) or sometimes actively harmful (biofuels).

Expensive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and North America seemed particularly fruitless when China, India and other developing countries weren’t about to curb their own appetite for fossil fuels. There was also a millenarian fervor that bothered me about climate activism, with its apocalyptic imagery (the Statue of Liberty underwater) and threats of doom unless we were willing to live far more frugally.

That was my frame of mind when, in April 2017, I wrote my first column for The Times, “Climate of Complete Certainty.” The blowback was intense. Climate scientists denounced me in open letters; petitions were circulated demanding that I be fired. The response mainly hardened my conviction that climate activists were guilty of precisely what I charged them with: intellectual self-certainty that is often a prescription for disaster.

Among the signatories of one petition was an oceanographer, John Englander, who runs an educational and advocacy group, the Rising Seas Institute. Two years later, on a visit to New York, he wrote me out of the blue and asked to meet. Unlike most of my detractors, his note was so cordial that it seemed churlish to say no. We met the next day.

Englander is a trim, affable and eloquent man of 72 who once ran the Cousteau Society and reminds me of a bearded Patrick Stewart, albeit with an American accent. His pitch was simple: The coastline we have taken for granted for thousands of years of human history changed rapidly in the past on account of natural forces — and would soon be changing rapidly and disastrously by man-made ones. A trip to Greenland, which holds one-eighth of the world’s ice on land (most of the rest is in Antarctica) would show me just how drastic those changes have been. Would I join him?

Again, it seemed churlish to say no (though the pandemic would delay my trip by two years). More to the point, if my main objection to the climate activists was my impression of their overweening certitude, didn’t it behoove me to check my own? Where — except in the risk of changing my mind — was the harm in testing my views?

But we need to recognize
clean energy’s limitations. But we need to
recognize clean energy’s
limitations.

From a jetliner, the most striking features of Greenland seem to be its vastness and its blankness, which put me in mind of a line from Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places”: “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/With no expression, nothing to express.” It was only when I got to the sheet itself that I realized the line could not be less apt. Trapped in the whiteness was a story about the world’s distant past and potential future.

Greenland is about the size of Alaska and California combined and, except at its coasts, is covered by ice that in places is nearly two miles thick. Even that’s only a fraction of the ice in Antarctica, which is more than six times as large. But the Arctic is warming at nearly four times the global average, meaning Greenland’s ice also poses a nearer-term risk because it is melting faster. If all its ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise by some 24 feet. That would be more than enough to inundate hundreds of coastal cities in scores of nations, from Jakarta and Bangkok to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Miami and New Orleans.

But just how fast is Greenland’s ice melting right now? Is this an emergency for our time, or is it a problem for the future?

Measuring ice loss on scales so vast is no easy task, since Greenland, like a spendthrift billionaire, is both constantly accumulating and shedding almost unfathomable quantities of ice over long spans of time. But scientists have been drilling ice-core samples from Greenland for decades, giving them a very good idea of climatic changes stretching back thousands of years. Better yet, a pair of satellites that detect anomalies in Earth’s gravity fields has been taking measurements of the sheet regularly for nearly 20 years, giving scientists a much more precise idea of what is happening.

The data shows unmistakably that Greenland’s ice is not in balance. It is losing far more than it is gaining.

From April 2002 to July 2022, Greenland has lost more than 5,000 gigatons of ice to the ocean

250 miles

Greenland

Ice mass change

relative to 2002

+0.5

no change

–1

–2

–3

–4

–5 meters of ice

Source: NASA

In Copenhagen before my departure for Greenland, I chatted with Liam Colgan, a Canadian research climatologist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “We haven’t had a good positive mass balance year since the late 1990s,” he told me in a follow-on email when I asked him to explain the data for me. The losses can vary sharply by year. The annualized average over the past 30 years, he added, is 170 gigatons per year. That’s the equivalent of about 5,400 tons of ice loss per second. That “suggests that Greenland ice loss has been tracking the I.P.C.C. worse-case, highest-carbon-emission scenario.” (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the U.N. body that assesses climate change.)

Still, it’s hard to forecast with any precision what that means. “Anyone who says they know what the sea level is going to be in 2100 is giving you an educated guess,” said NASA’s Willis. “The fact is, we’re seeing these big ice sheets melt for the first time in history, and we don’t really know how fast they can go.”

His own educated guess: “By 2100, we are probably looking at more than a foot or two and hopefully less than seven or eight feet. But we are struggling to figure out just how fast the ice sheets can melt. So the upper end of range is still not well known.”

On the face of it, that sounds manageable. Even if sea levels rise by eight feet, won’t the world have nearly 80 years to come to grips with the problem, during which technologies that help us mitigate the effects of climate change while adapting to its consequences are likely to make dramatic advances? Won’t the world — including countries that today are poor — become far richer and thus more capable of weathering the floods, surges and superstorms?

But we’ve gotten better at
mitigating climate disasters. But we’ve gotten
better at mitigating
climate disasters.

Englander isn’t at all sanguine. The average rate at which sea level is rising around the world, he estimates, has more than tripled over the past three decades, to five millimeters a year from 1.5 millimeters. That may still seem minute, yet as the world learned during the pandemic, exponential increases have a way of hitting hard.

“When something is on a straight line or a smooth curve, you can plot its trajectory,” Englander said. “But sea level, like earthquakes and mudslides, is something that happens irregularly and can change rather quickly and surprise us. The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.”

Another major wild card is Antarctica, where the average rate of ice mass loss is more than 150 gigatons a year. Shortly after I returned from Greenland, a glacier in West Antarctica called Thwaites, roughly the size of Florida, caught the world’s attention when a study suggested it was, according to a co-author, Robert Larter of the British Antarctic Survey, “holding on today by its fingernails.”

Or was that alarmist? In The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, where I used to work, the theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, a former under secretary for science in the Obama administration’s Energy Department, cast doubt on the threat from Thwaites in a voice that could have once been mine. He also thinks the risks associated with Greenland’s melting are less a product of human-induced global warming than of natural cycles in North Atlantic currents and temperatures, which over time have a way of regressing to the mean.

“Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as ‘just weather,’” he wrote in February.

Another climate nonalarmist is Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I call Pielke a nonalarmist rather than a skeptic because he readily acknowledges that the challenges associated with climate change, including sea-level rise, are real, serious and probably unstoppable, at least for many decades.

But that is also the source of his (relative) optimism. “If we have to have a problem,” he told me when I reached him by phone, “we probably want one with a slow onset that we can see coming. It’s not like an asteroid coming from space.”

Among Pielke’s areas of expertise is the analysis of long-term trends in weather and climate-related disasters. Even as the nominal cost of hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts has grown, the economic impact of these disasters relative to the overall size of the economy continues to fall, a function of better forecasting, infrastructure, planning and responsiveness when disaster strikes — all of which, in turn, are the result of the massive increase in wealth the world has enjoyed in the past century.

“Since the 1940s, the impact of floods as a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product has dropped by 70 percent-plus,” Pielke said. “We see this around the world, across phenomena. The story is that fewer people are dying and we are having less damage proportional to G.D.P.”

A considerable amount of data bears Pielke out. In the 1920s, the estimated average annual death toll from natural catastrophes around the globe averaged more than 500,000 a year. The 1931 China floods alone killed as many as four million people not only through drowning but also by exposure, disease and famine. A more recent example, the 1970 Bhola cyclone, killed as many as half a million people in what is now Bangladesh.

In the 2010s, the annual average death toll was below 50,000 — a tenth of what it was a century ago. Hurricane Ian, among the strongest storms ever to hit Florida, had a death toll of at least 119, a small fraction of the 8,000 believed killed by the Great Galveston hurricane of 1900

Even the poorest countries, while still unacceptably vulnerable, are suffering far fewer human and economic losses to climate-related disasters.

Global warming is real and getting worse, Pielke said, yet still it’s possible that humanity will be able to adapt to, and compensate for, its effects.

The death rate from natural disasters has fallen globally

Average number of deaths per 100,000 people, by decade

Source: EM-DAT Note: Natural disasters include all geophysical, meteorological and climate events like earthquakes, volcanic activity, landslides, drought, wildfires, storms and flooding.

Or maybe not. A few years ago, I would have found voices like Koonin’s and Pielke’s persuasive. Now I’m less sure. What intervened was a pandemic.

Just as I had once scoffed at the idea of climate doom, I had also, for almost identical reasons, dismissed predictions of another catastrophic pandemic on a par with the 1918-20 influenza outbreak. After all, hadn’t we pushed through previous alarms involving Ebola, SARS, MERS and vCJD (mad cow disease) without immense loss of life? Hadn’t virology, epidemiology, public hygiene, drug development and medicine all come a long way since the end of World War I, rendering comparisons with past pandemics mostly moot?

That’s what I thought until the spring of 2020, when, along with everyone else, I experienced how swiftly and implacably nature can overwhelm even the richest and most technologically advanced societies. It was a lesson in the sort of intellectual humility I recommended for others and began to realize I could use more of myself.

It was also a lesson in thinking about risk, especially those in the category known as high-impact, low-probability events that seem to be hitting us with such regularity in this century: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011, the mass upheavals in the Arab world that began with a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation.

Here were some questions that gnawed at me: What if the past does nothing to predict the future? What if climate risks do not evolve gradually and relatively predictably but instead suddenly soar uncontrollably? How much lead time is required to deal with something like sea-level rise? How do we weigh the risks of underreacting to climate change against the risks of overreacting to it?

I called Seth Klarman, one of the world’s most successful hedge-fund managers, to think through questions of risk. While he’s not an expert on climate change, he has spent decades thinking deeply about every manner of risk. He’s also one of the rare people with a capacity to change his mind — including, he readily acknowledges, about climate risk. “I’ve talked to so many experts and seen so much evidence,” he told me over Zoom, “I’m convinced the climate is changing, and addressing climate change has become a philanthropic priority of mine.”

“If you face something that is potentially existential,” he explained, “existential for nations, even for life as we know it, even if you thought the risk is, say, 5 percent, you’d want to hedge against it.”

How?

“One thing we try to do,” he said, “is we buy protection when it’s really inexpensive, even when we think we may well not need it.” The forces contributing to climate change, he noted, echoing Englander, “might be irreversible sooner than the damage from climate change has become fully apparent. You can’t say it’s far off and wait when, if you had acted sooner, you might have dealt with it better and at less cost. We have to act now.”

In other words, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s particularly true if climate change is akin to cancer — manageable or curable in its earlier stages, disastrous in its later ones.

For Klarman, the simplest and most obvious climate hedge is a carbon tax. By “raising the price of oil, gas and coal to make alternative energy more economically attractive,” he said, “capitalists will be incentivized to act.”

Klarman recognizes that such a tax is easier said than done because, if it’s enacted by only a few nations, it becomes more of a form of virtue signaling than a serious climate change policy. Carbon taxes also tend to impose their burdens inequitably, favoring city dwellers over exurban and rural ones, knowledge businesses over manufacturers.

There’s a reason Barack Obama rejected a carbon tax, knowing it could be deeply unpopular among voters, and why France’s carbon tax sparked the “yellow vest” public revolt that has energized the far right.

As I’ve always believed, knowing there is grave risk to future generations — and expecting current ones to make immediate sacrifices for it — defies most of what we know about human nature. So I began to think more deeply about that challenge, and others.

But we need to accept economic
growth as a benefit. But we need to
accept economic growth
as a benefit.

When I had dinner with Stensgaard, the mining executive, he mentioned a statistic that stunned me. For the world to achieve the net-zero goal for carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, we will have to mine, by 2040, six times the current amounts of critical minerals — nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, chromium, rare earths and other minerals and elements — needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels. And we will almost certainly have to do it from sources other than Russia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places that pose unacceptable strategic, environmental or humanitarian risks.

To bring carbon emissions to net zero, the world needs significantly more minerals

Global demand for minerals like copper, nickel, lithium and graphite, by type of clean energy

Source: International Energy Agency

That should be great news for people like Stensgaard — provided Greenlanders are willing to go along. Across the iceberg-strewn bay from where we dined lies Disko Island, twice the size of Long Island and home to around 1,000 people. According to Stensgaard, it is believed to contain 12 million to 16 million tons of nickel. To put that figure in perspective, Stensgaard told me that according to one estimate, the Norilsk nickel mine in Russia, one of the largest in the world, has produced about 8.3 million tons since the 1940s.

A world committed to net zero will need many more Disko Islands to supply its “clean” energy needs. I put the word “clean” in quotation marks because the term is a misnomer. As in everything else in life, so too with the environment: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Whether it’s nuclear, biofuels, natural gas, hydroelectric or, yes, wind and solar, there will always be serious environmental downsides to any form of energy when used on a massive scale. A single industrial-size wind turbine, for instance, typically requires about a ton of rare earth metals as well as three metric tons of copper, which is notoriously destructive and dirty to mine.

Just as significantly, as I’ve long believed, no “clean energy” solution will easily liberate us from our overwhelming and, for now, inescapable dependence on fossil fuels.

But we need solutions that
align with human nature. But we need
solutions that align with
human nature.

Nobody brings the point home better than Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose most recent book, “How the World Really Works,” should be required reading for policymakers and anyone else interested in a serious discussion about potential climate solutions.

Many people tend to think of fossil fuels mostly in terms of transportation, electrical generation and heating. But how often do we consider the necessity of fossil fuels in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, without which, Smil noted, “it would be impossible to feed at least 40 percent and up to 50 percent of today’s nearly eight billion people”? It’s difficult to imagine modern life without plastics, made mainly from the hydrocarbons ethylene and propylene, or steel, made with coking coal and natural gas, or cement or asphalt.

Some critics respond to Smil’s arguments with a type of heroic optimism that borders on magical thinking. Why, they ask, can’t we do more to grow our food organically and distribute and consume it locally? The only way we could do that and make a meaningful difference for the climate is if millions of us returned to farming, while accepting a world that can feed far fewer people. Or they cheer investments in wind and solar power without adequately considering that merely increasing the supply of renewable energy does very little to diminish a continued overall demand for fossil fuels, because we have yet to solve the intermittence problem: The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, and we haven’t figured out how to store extra energy at the necessary scale.

The poster child for this kind of magical thinking is Germany, which undertook a historic Energiewende — “energy revolution” — only to come up short. At the turn of the century, Germany got about 85 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels. Now it gets about 78 percent, a puny reduction, considering that the country has spent massive sums on renewables to increase the share of electricity it generates from them.

What went wrong? Many things, not least Angela Merkel’s abrupt decision to shut down all of Germany’s nuclear power plants right after the Fukushima disaster of 2011. That forced Germany to lean more heavily on coal, foreign oil and gas. Now Germany faces a winter with the prospect of uncertain energy supplies from its former partners in Moscow.

Things could turn a corner once scientists finally figure out a technical solution to the energy storage problem. Or when governments and local actors get over their NIMBYism when it comes to permitting and building a large energy grid to move electricity from Germany’s windy north to its energy-hungry south. Or when thoughtful environmental activists finally come to grips with the necessity of nuclear energy — one of the few energy sources, along with hydroelectric power, that combine reliability, energy density and no direct carbon emissions.

Till then, even as I’ve come to accept the danger we face, I think it’s worth extending the cancer metaphor a little further: Just as cancer treatments, when they work at all, can have terrible side effects, much the same can be said of climate treatments: The gap between an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment remains dismayingly wide. The problem has become clearer to me; the solution hasn’t.

But we need to avoid
alarmist activism. But we need to avoid
alarmist activism.

Maybe, I realized, in assessing my newfound concerns about climate change, my long-held beliefs might provide a solution — look to the market.

The way we’ve dealt with other vast and persistent problems provides some lessons.

For many decades, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies, foreign and domestic, pumped trillions of dollars into some of the world’s poorest countries, with ingenious development schemes that fell apart on contact with local realities. The developing world got stuck in debt traps, aid-fueled corruption and debilitating cycles of dependency.

Only when countries like Vietnam and China turned to a different model, of largely bottom-up, market-driven development, did hundreds of millions of people get lifted out of destitution.

Or consider another remarkable fact noted by Smil: In the United States, the difference between total water consumption in 1965 and 2015 is less than 4 percent. In the same span of time, population grew by more than 60 percent.

Laws, regulations and growing environmental awareness played important roles. So did increasing urbanization: More people living in apartments means fewer lawns that need to be watered.

But the most important transformation has come in agriculture, which uses about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater supply.

Farmers gradually adopted sprinkler and drip irrigation systems, rather than more wasteful flood irrigation, not to conserve water but because the technology provided higher crop yields and larger profit margins.

But the market, not the state,
will solve the problem. But the market,
not the state, will solve
the problem.

Water shortages “will spur a revolutionary, aggressive approach to getting rid of flood irrigation,” said Seth Siegel, the chief sustainability officer of the Israeli AgTech company N-Drip. “Most of this innovation will be driven by free-market capitalism, with important incentives from government and NGOs.”

Despite noble intentions, climate-change action has too often involved top-down plans with grandiose ambitions and poor execution.

There was a time when Al Gore was emphatically in favor of ethanol, support that George W. Bush later made his own through the 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard. It is now widely acknowledged to be an unmitigated failure, costing billions in regulatory compliance, but unkillable because of its popularity with farm-state politicians. Cap-and-trade systems were once touted as a market-friendly way to control carbon dioxide emissions. Yet from Europe to California to the agencies of the U.N., bureaucrats and industry have consistently found ways to game or corrupt the trading of emissions permits. The 2015 Paris Agreement that the Biden administration rejoined with such fanfare sets highly ambitious targets for greenhouse gas reductions that burnish the environmental credentials of the governments that sign it. But the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and the idea that countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and India (which is growing more — not less — dependent on coal) are going to meet their stated emissions targets is fanciful to the point of absurdity.

Yet meaningful environmental progress has been made through market forces. In this century, America’s carbon dioxide emissions across fuel types have fallen to well below 5,000 million metric tons per year, from a peak of about 6,000 million in 2007, even as our inflation-adjusted G.D.P. has grown by over 50 percent and total population by about 17 percent.

Renewables, particularly wind power, played a role. So did efficiency mandates.

Yet the biggest single driver in emissions reductions from 2005 to 2017 was the switch from coal to natural gas for power generation, since gas produces roughly half the carbon dioxide as coal. This, in turn, was the result of a fracking revolution in the past decade, fiercely resisted by many environmental activists, that made the United States the world’s largest gas producer. As with nuclear power, fracking carries real environmental risks (including methane emissions) that can’t be ignored. But anyone interested in useful solutions that significantly reduce emissions without incurring huge costs needs to not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

In the long run, we are likelier to make progress when we adopt partial solutions that work with the grain of human nature, not big ones that work against it. Sometimes those solutions will be legislative — at least when they nudge, rather than force, the private sector to move in the right direction. But more often they will come from the bottom up, in the form of innovations and practices tested in markets, adopted by consumers and continually refined by use. They may not be directly related to climate change but can nonetheless have a positive impact on it. And they probably won’t come in the form of One Big Idea but in thousands of little ones whose cumulative impacts add up.

On my last night in Greenland I took an evening boat ride through the enormous icebergs that had pushed their way out of the Ilulissat Icefjord and were now beginning to float free in the deep waters of Disko Bay. It is generally believed that one such iceberg made its way from the bay to a spot in the North Atlantic where it met the R.M.S. Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank it. It’s easy to get carried away with a metaphor, but it was hard not to think that Greenland could produce a similarly awful surprise, on a vastly greater scale, for an overconfident civilization that can’t bring itself to prepare adequately for the unthinkable moment when it could suddenly founder.

Except we are not that civilization.

The problem with our civilization isn’t overconfidence. It’s polarization, paralysis and a profound lack of trust in all institutions, including the scientific one (another pandemic-era lesson). Devising effective climate policies begins with recognizing the reality of the social and political landscape in which all policy operates. Some thoughts on how we might do better:

1) Engagement with critics is vital. Insults and stridency are never good tools of persuasion, and trying to cow or censor climate skeptics into silence rarely works. Englander got a lot further with me by saying, “Let’s talk,” than by signing a letter saying, in effect, “Shut up.” I too might have spared myself the outraged reception to my first column if it hadn’t been preceded by the name-calling of my old columns — such as when I called climate activists “a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate.”

2) Separate facts from predictions and predictions from policy. Global warming is a fact. So is the human contribution to it. So are observed increases in temperature and sea levels. So are continued increases if we continue to do more of the same. But the rate of those increases is difficult to predict even with the most sophisticated computer modeling. The scientific establishment would do more to enhance trust if it communicated what it isn’t sure of — like the relation between climate change and specific extreme weather events — as much as what it is. It would enhance it even further if climate scientists did not use the authority of their field to push for policies whose economic, political and social implications they might not fully understand.

3) Don’t allow climate to become a mainly left-of-center concern. One reason the topic of climate has become so anathema to many conservatives is that so many of the proposed solutions have the flavor, and often the price tag, of old-fashioned statism. But climate is a universally shared good and ought to be a truly common interest. Conservatives can do a lot more to develop their own set of realistic policy prescriptions (for instance, expedited permitting and tax breaks for next-generation nuclear energy). But first, many of them have to be brought around, as I was this year, about the need for action.

The conservative movement
needs to set an example for its children
and prepare for the future. The conservative
movement needs to
set an example
for its children and
prepare for the
future.

4) Be honest about the nature of the challenge. Talk of an imminent climate catastrophe is probably misleading, at least in the way most people understand “imminent.” A continual drumbeat of alarm may do more to exhaust voters than it will to rouse them. A more accurate description of the challenge might be a “potentially imminent tipping point,” meaning the worst consequences of climate change can still be far off but the end of our ability to reverse them is drawing near. Again, the metaphor of cancer — never safe to ignore and always better to deal with at Stage 2 than at Stage 4 — can be helpful.

5) Be humble about the nature of the solutions. The larger the political and financial investment in a “big fix” response to climate change on the scale of the Energiewende, the greater the loss in time, capital and (crucially) public trust when it doesn’t work as planned. Sometimes it pays to think small. As Smil noted, we can also do a lot of good by requiring triple-pane windows and proper insulation to make homes that are often likely to stand for 100 years vastly more energy efficient in cold winters and hot summers. A shift away from S.U.V.s — the ubiquity of which is a perverse outgrowth of 1970s-era fuel efficiency standards that created exemptions for light trucks — would be another quiet but major advance.

6) Begin solving problems our great-grandchildren will face. Start with sea-level rise: We cannot move Miami or Kolkata anytime soon, if ever. But we can act immediately to preserve more of our shoreline from further development and urbanization. We can also stop providing incentives for building in flood-prone areas by raising the price of federal flood insurance to reflect the increased risk more accurately.

7) Stop viewing economic growth as a problem. Industrialization may be the leading cause of climate change. But we cannot and will not reverse it through some form of deindustrialization, which would send the world into poverty and deprivation. Instead, economic growth should be seen as an ally in the fight against climate change, because it creates both the wealth that can mitigate the effects of climate change and the technological innovation needed to address its causes. That’s especially true of poorer countries, for which foreign investment, free trade, market-oriented reforms and good regulatory frameworks will do more to build climate resilience than additional billions in foreign aid.

😎 Get serious about the environmental trade-offs that come with clean energy. You cannot support wind farms but hinder the transmission lines needed to bring their power to the markets where they are needed. You cannot support wind farms but sue to block them in places where they might block your view of Nantucket Sound. You cannot support wind farms but support environmental regulations that make mining for rare earths in the United States unprofitable and send the industry to China (where meaningful regulations are effectively nonexistent). And you cannot cheer U.S. reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but oppose the fracking revolution in natural gas that helped bring it about.

9) A problem for the future is, by its very nature, a moral one. A conservative movement that claims to care about what we owe the future has the twin responsibility of setting an example for its children and at the same time preparing for that future. The same prudential logic that applies to personal finances, business decisions, Social Security, the federal debt or other risks to financial solvency should dictate thoughtful policies when it comes to climate.

I arrived in Greenland thinking about Robert Frost’s “Desert Places.” When I left, the verses I had in mind were from “God’s Grandeur,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that my father had me memorize as a boy:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

More on climate change

 

 

Der Preis für den längsten Post geht an @gerison 😅😅

[ventoux]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb GrazerTourer:

Wie kann man das alles überhaupt auf fehlende Infrastruktur schieben? Ja, die Folgen sind mal stärker mal weniger stark, wenn die Kanalisation geflutet wird und es zu viel versiegelten Boden gibt. Aber das ganze Wasser, das früher nie da war und jetzt auf einmal da ist, ist halt dennoch die Folge von der Klimaveränderung. 

 

Wenn man sich in einer Beziehung jahrelang nur bekriegt und schlägt, ist das Problem auch nicht, dass einer keinen Boxkurs hat... 😅

Wieviele Smileys braucht es eigentlich damit du etwas als Spaß, Sarkasmus erkennst? 

[GrazerTourer]

vor 24 Minuten schrieb ventoux:

Wieviele Smileys braucht es eigentlich damit du etwas als Spaß, Sarkasmus erkennst? 

Deine Smileys sagen doch, dass die Infrastruktur in GR generell mies ist. Und deuten an, dass es eh klar ist, dass dort alles schwimmt wenn's regnet. 

[NoWin]

vor 4 Stunden schrieb BikeBär:

Die Ausnahmen (im Moment seh ich eigentlich nur einen), die schon die Existenz des Klimawandels leugnen, werden wir aushalten. Ich hab mich dazu diese Woche eh einmal ausführlich geäußert, damit is dieser konkrete Fall für mich aber auch im Wesentlichen abgeschlossen, wird bestmöglich ignoriert und ich wende mich wieder den oben erwähnten interessanten Aspekten des Themas zu.

Dann schau dir mal die dazugehörige Umfrage (auf jeder Seite ganz oben) an - da sind wir bei 27%, die hier mehr Panikmache sehen als einen Klimawandel. Oder glaubst vielleicht, dass ich 97 Stimmen abgegeben habe?

 

Ich bin halt einer der wenigen, die auch den Mund aufmachen - viele andere denken genauso und halten sich halt beim schreiben zurück.