Scientists Say They Can Calculate the Cost of Oil Giants' Role In Global Warming (washingtonpost.com) 159
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Oil and gas companies are facing hundreds of lawsuits around the world testing whether they can be held responsible for their role in causing climate change. Now, two scientists say they've built a tool that can calculate how much damage each company's planet-warming pollution has caused -- and how much money they could be forced to pay if they're successfully sued. Collectively, greenhouse emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies caused the world $28 trillion in damage from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020, according to a paper published Wednesday in Nature. The new analysis could fuel an emerging legal fight.The authors, Dartmouth associate professor Justin Mankin and Chris Callahan, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, say their model can determine a specific company's share of responsibility over any time period. [...]
Callahan and Mankin's work combines all of these steps -- estimating a company's historical emissions, figuring out how much those emissions contributed to climate change and calculating how much economic damage climate change has caused -- into one "end-to-end" model that links one polluter's emissions to a dollar amount of economic damage from extreme heat. By their calculation, Saudi Aramco is on the hook for $2.05 trillion in economic losses from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020. Russia's Gazprom is responsible for $2 trillion, Chevron for $1.98 trillion, ExxonMobil for $1.91 trillion and BP for $1.45 trillion. Industry groups and companies tend to object to the methodologies of attribution science. They could seek to contest the assumptions that went into each step of Mankin and Callahan's model.
Indeed, every step in that process introduces some room for error, and stringing together all of those steps compounds the uncertainty in the model, according to Delta Merner, lead scientist at theScience Hub for Climate Litigation, which connects scientists and lawyers bringing climate lawsuits. She also mentioned that the researchers relied on a commonly used but simplified climate model known as the Finite Amplitude Impulse Response (FAIR) model. "It is robust for the purpose of what the study is doing," Merner said, "but these models do make assumptions about climate sensitivity, about carbon cycle behavior, energy balance, and all of the simplifications in there do introduce some uncertainty." The exact dollar figures in the paper aren't intended as gospel. But outside scientists said Mankin and Callahan use well-established, peer-reviewed datasets and climate models for every step in their process, and they are transparent about the uncertainty in the numbers.
Callahan and Mankin's work combines all of these steps -- estimating a company's historical emissions, figuring out how much those emissions contributed to climate change and calculating how much economic damage climate change has caused -- into one "end-to-end" model that links one polluter's emissions to a dollar amount of economic damage from extreme heat. By their calculation, Saudi Aramco is on the hook for $2.05 trillion in economic losses from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020. Russia's Gazprom is responsible for $2 trillion, Chevron for $1.98 trillion, ExxonMobil for $1.91 trillion and BP for $1.45 trillion. Industry groups and companies tend to object to the methodologies of attribution science. They could seek to contest the assumptions that went into each step of Mankin and Callahan's model.
Indeed, every step in that process introduces some room for error, and stringing together all of those steps compounds the uncertainty in the model, according to Delta Merner, lead scientist at theScience Hub for Climate Litigation, which connects scientists and lawyers bringing climate lawsuits. She also mentioned that the researchers relied on a commonly used but simplified climate model known as the Finite Amplitude Impulse Response (FAIR) model. "It is robust for the purpose of what the study is doing," Merner said, "but these models do make assumptions about climate sensitivity, about carbon cycle behavior, energy balance, and all of the simplifications in there do introduce some uncertainty." The exact dollar figures in the paper aren't intended as gospel. But outside scientists said Mankin and Callahan use well-established, peer-reviewed datasets and climate models for every step in their process, and they are transparent about the uncertainty in the numbers.
Wait (Score:4, Informative)
The main role (Score:5, Informative)
The main role of oil companies in global warming has been that they had set up a large and well-funded campaign to dismiss or discredit climate science, using lessons learned from the campaign by the tobacco industry decades earlier to attack the science showing the health effects of smoking. It's important to remember that the oil companies are not mere billion-dollar industries; they are a multi-trillion dollar industry, and even small changes in oil consumption represents billions and billions of dollars.
The worse problem here is that the campaign to attack the science has bled over into other areas; science denial is rampant in our society, from flat-Earthers to moon-landing deniers to pretty much all of modern science.
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If you put massive fines on the oil companies you need to be prepared for their obvious response. Because if you massively fine them for selling oil products the first thing they are going to do is stop selling those oil products into whatever state or country which enacts those fines. It only make sense, if you are incurring massive fines the very first thing you should do is to stop accruing even more fines from continued shipment.
This will stop the release of carbon in those countries and states, but you
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They won't stop selling. Their obvious response is to bribe politicians, just like they always have. Why lose billions in sales when stuffing a few pockets with a million or two will do the trick.
Re: The main role (Score:2)
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the solution is to work on developing better technologies.
By and large, those technologies exist already. But we need to have the will to adopt them, and say goodbye to less climate-friendly technologies. That is occurring, but not quickly enough.
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The oil companies can try crippling nation states if they want to, but I suspect that they will find the consequences rather severe.
The best way to do it would be some hefty fines now and a new tax regime that strongly encourages profits to be invested in reducing reliance on oil. The oil companies can then choose - no profits, or they invest in profitable alternatives and secure their futures.
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>> the first thing they are going to do is stop selling those oil products
More than 65% of oil is used for transportation fuel, and that can largely be eliminated with electric vehicles. And then there's methane, which the oil companies routinely flare or dump into the atmosphere.
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More than 65% of oil is used for transportation fuel, and that can largely be eliminated with electric vehicles.
How many people believe that bullshit any more?
Even if that were true we won't have the capacity to replace every vehicle with an electric equivalent for 30 years. You want to dispute that? Okay, break down for everyone reading where the materials required for these vehicles will be mined from, how soon those mines can be opened, and some kind of estimates on cost. Maybe we could get to all electric vehicles in 30 years or less if cost was not a factor but cost is a factor.
And then there's methane, which the oil companies routinely flare or dump into the atmosphere.
A lot less of that would happen
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Economic retaliation from the usa is kind of moot now because the usa is economically retaliating against its closest allies for no reason. Now is the perfect time to nationalize the oil, what are they gonna do.. tariff it?
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Economic retaliation from the usa is kind of moot now because the usa is economically retaliating against its closest allies for no reason.
True.
Now is the perfect time to nationalize the oil, what are they gonna do.. tariff it?
They're gonna fellate it and hope some money squirts out of the derricks, same as it ever was.
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Counterpoint: Saudi Aramco, the 4th largest oil company in the world is majority state owned and has been for a long time.
Now I would say neither of those nations are idea models the USA should follow in how to nationalize nor examples of nations I want to emulate but there is nothing specific about nationalized industries that makes the by idea unworkable, it's all in the details and circumstances and what your goals are.
So no, no more just saying "VENEZUELA" and expecting that to do all the brainwork for
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I say this as a moderate 'leftie'. Chavez had his admirers in the early days, kick out the crony capitalists and run things for the people...
But y'know cults of personality, left or right, is no excuse to through out the checks and balances of democracy and reign by iron-fisted Presidential decree. Even Nikita warned about this in the 1950s with his speech denouncing Stalinism as a state doctrine.
It was more than an oil project, this vision of '21st century Bolivarian Socialism'. When you turn away from an
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It seems to work in Norway though.
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The main role of oil companies in global warming has been that they had set up a large and well-funded campaign to dismiss or discredit climate science
Are we not supposed to hear all sides of the argument and make up our own minds? It sounds like you're doing exactly what you're accusing the other side of, trying to suppress people from hearing arguments. If they're not afraid of the shakiness of their position, why not put all the information out there and let people decide? We'll be able to settle it for ourselves in our own minds hearing the full set of facts, not a cherry picked argument from one side.
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Isn't consumption the problem, rather than production? As far as I can tell, basically all human systems across the globe now depend on oil. Doesn't that make us all complicit?
Yes, came here to post this. It's a bit disingenuous to say that the oil companies are "responsible" for the environmental damage. And it's absurd to suggest that they might now be "sued" for that damage. It's as though I decided to sue In-N-Out Burger for giving me a dad bod. They made a legal product, and they sold it to me in a manner that was legal (and, in fact, heavily regulated and taxed). And, frankly, I did have some idea of the consequences when I ate that double cheeseburger; I'm not an idio
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You know who is even less popular than the Republicans? The Democrats!
And that means you have to stop advocating for extreme and illogical positions which violate common sense.
That's like asking a fish to not swim. The totalitarian streak in the left requires extreme and illogical positions
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>> another person's reading between the lines
Also known as making stuff up and trying to present it as fact.
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>> When we make statements like "Exxon Mobil is to blame for our current climate crisis, all $100 trillion of it, and they should be sued into oblivion"
I haven't seen anyone make statements like that. Sheer hyperbole.
OK. From TFS: "By their calculation, Saudi Aramco is on the hook for $2.05 trillion in economic losses from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020. Russia's Gazprom is responsible for $2 trillion, Chevron for $1.98 trillion, ExxonMobil for $1.91 trillion and BP for $1.45 trillion."
There, is that better? I'll admit, I was in a hurry, I couldn't be bothered to cite specific figures so I engaged in a little hyperbole. But my underlying point is *exactly* the same, now that I've quoted the actual figures.
The idea that
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You'd think. I went looking for their methodology, but everything's behind paywalls. Are they calculating only the contribution from extraction, refining, etc., or are they also including the contribution from end users of their product?
Re: Wait (Score:2)
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Keep in mind: oil/gas producers also are enormous consumers of the same energy, and there are lots of emissions from their operations. Drill rigs, pump jacks, refineries, pipelines, and tankers aren't powered by pixie dust. Depending on whose numbers, which fuel, and what country you're talking about, each unit of fossil fuel energy takes 0.02 to 0.50 units of energy to produce. Gas wells and pipelines leak methane. Gas flaring is not benign. Oil
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Yes, consumption generates the pollution and the producers are just doing what makes them money.
However, we shouldn't blame consumers when:
Most of the time they don't have a choice to not burn fossils.
EVs are cheaper to run but more expensive to build and the fossil industry has spent billions on buying politicians to keep EVs out of the hands of consumers. Same with heating your house (fossil NG vs. heat pumps).
Same with the electricity you buy (barriers to wind and solar PV vs electric utility lobbyists).
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I am fortunate that I have been able to afford solar PV and an EV and install heat pumps in my house and office building so that now I have free or very low cost energy to run things but it has been difficult to navigate the building department, complex rules, utility barriers and meager incentives. Most people don't have the ability, time and finances to navigate these hurdles so are stuck buying expensive fossils.
For some definition of fortunate I suppose.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Unfortunately the FUD article is behind a paywall so I'll just ignore the FUD.
My experience is a dramatic reduction in my energy cost. It's mostly free now that it has earned back its initial cost.
Re:Wait (Score:4, Interesting)
Big Oil has spent a lot of money making us dependent on oil. Are we all complicit? Not those of us with little to no decision making power, and especially not if we voted for something better.
Come up with a way to go without everything you currently rely on oil for. Start with your computer and cell phone, where so many parts rely on plastics to make them work. Next, do the same with medications. The chemistry involved with creating and scaling these things from scratch just doesn't exist without oil. Recycling is improving these things, and thanks to the orange man's tariffs, the idea of recycling rare earth elements is finally being taken seriously, but you have to start from nothing to have something to recycle.
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>> where so many parts rely on plastics to make them work
The article is about "greenhouse emissions from from 111 fossil fuel companies", not plastics or medicines. And in fact their methodology deducts the non-greenhouse uses of fossil fuels from the totals.
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Nobody is suggesting we cut off all oil tomorrow. They are suggesting that we accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, and punish companies that choose to resist those efforts instead of transitioning their businesses to other sources of revenue.
Re: Wait (Score:3)
Re: Wait (Score:3)
It doesn't matter if you make a better product if you can prove that large, moneyed interests sufficiently polluted the ability to determine what is better. If oil "isn't so bad" then something slightly more expensive and isn't super important is "worse". The mistake you make is assuming the market is transparent. The criminality of oil companies' actions is that they actively fought the conditions necessary for the market to function.
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There are substitutes to oil for most/all of the things you mention. However, oil subsidies and bought and paid for politicians keep these substitutes expensive and profit is more important than people.
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Crops like sugar beets and sugarcane can be carbon neutral if done properly.
Carbon neutrality is not the only important criteria, even when it comes to global warming, but especially when we talk about biofuels. If they are topsoil-based then they cannot be carbon-neutral in the long term as they deplete the soil, and we make our fertilizers synthetically now. Sooner or later you will have to start fertilizing, because machine cultivation of monocultures causes direct soil depletion as well as the creation of hardpan — trapping water and leading to anaerobic conditions which
Re:Wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't consumption the problem, rather than production?
Big Oil has spent a lot of money making us dependent on oil. Are we all complicit? Not those of us with little to no decision making power, and especially not if we voted for something better.
Nobody at Big Oil forced 100 million people to get up this morning and load a single-use plastic Keurig pod into their complex plastic-and-electronics Keurig.
Nobody at Big Oil forced 200 million people this afternoon to idle their cars in a line waiting to hand their plastic card over to a teenager who will swipe the plastic card in a plastic POS terminal, then hand it back along with a single-use bag containing further single-use plastic/styro containers containing food, and a stack of napkins which will be wadded up and thrown away with everything else.
Nobody at Big Oil forced 300 million people to buy a washing machine and dryer that rely on deeply complex rare-earth computer circuit boards (which will soon fail rendering the entire rest of the machine's metal/plastic useless waste) so SensoKleen technology can weigh each load and determine the precise agitator RPM for "Our Most Powerful Clean Ever!" and then use their WiFi card to play downloaded Lady Gaga ringtones when the spin cycle ends, instead of, you know, simple mechanical machines that already worked just fine 40 years ago. Congrats on getting your polyester clothing 12.73% cleaner than grandma, I guess.
Nobody at Big Oil forced 400 million people to buy cars that have electronically-controlled seats that require complex circuitry and motors and other doomed-to-fail parts, instead of just a couple basic handle/cranks that use ratcheting levers that were already known to the ancient world long before industrial petrochemistry.
Everyone who claims to have "little to no decision making power" sounds like a 5 year old kid saying, "Yeah but he hit me FIRST!" Corporations aren't burning/refining oil just for the sake of being evil. They are burning oil to give you things you want. You want fast, lightweight, low-effort, convenient, impermeable, microwaveable, durable stuff in all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors that absolutely do not exist in circle-of-life paint-with-all-the-colors-of-the-wind Nature.
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>Nobody at Big Oil forced
I mean they kinda did, though over a century of thumb-on-scales political and economic pressure to entrench themselves into every aspect of our culture and society while also suppressing attempts to develop or transition to alternatives. Nobody's forcing you to eat that shit sandwich, you're just not going to get anything else...
As for the rest of your post: "Yet you participate in society... I am very intelligent!"
=Smidge=
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>Nobody at Big Oil forced
I mean they kinda did, though over a century of thumb-on-scales political and economic pressure to entrench themselves into every aspect of our culture and society while also suppressing attempts to develop or transition to alternatives. Nobody's forcing you to eat that shit sandwich, you're just not going to get anything else...
As for the rest of your post: "Yet you participate in society... I am very intelligent!"
=Smidge=
100 million Keurigs and WiFi washing machines weren't even "kinda" forced on people, either with a literal gun or with a century of gradual sneaky political and economic pressure. You can brew coffee (and with FAR superior flavor, not to mention easy composting afterward) in any tempered-glass or porcelain container, just like your great great great great grandpappy. You can use a mechanical timer (or just, like put down your Candy Crush and turn off your 70" 4K soon-to-be-obsolete-again-again wifi TV and p
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> 100 million Keurigs and WiFi washing machines weren't even "kinda" forced on people
You seem oddly focused on these talking points. Setting aside the hilariously wrong implications you're making, consider for even a moment what the actual environmental impact these things are compared to, say, a century of burning fossil fuels in inefficient engines and power plants around the world.
Let's take the coffee pods thing as an example (even though that's posed to be even less of a problem [wired.com] going forward). I'm
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add to this the implication of all these costs calculations is that somehow the collective "we" is owed something as result.
Pretty much the entirety of population growth and economic success mid-century on of the US anywhere south of the Mason Dixon can be ascribed to cheap energy, a lot of that was Oil&Gas. Autos and air-conditioners changed everything.
The post war industrial boom was going to happen no matter what, realistically it would have been almost entirely coal fired without the Big Oil! What
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> The post war industrial boom was going to happen no matter what, realistically it would have been almost entirely coal fired without the Big Oil!
US infrastructure was built around personal automobiles instead of mass transit, to the point of existing light rail in major cities being either replaced with fuel burning busses or just removed to make more space for personal automobiles.
That one fact alone is worth hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 annually, to say nothing of the impact on local air quali
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TL/DR: Blame the consumer for products provided by industry. Products those same industries fought tooth-and-nail to protect from incursion by greener alternatives.
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This is just one example of you being incorrect. Big Oil and Big Auto worked hand in hand to destroy public transportation in America so that you would have to buy cars
That's nonsense. If anyone destroyed "public transportation", it was the American voter. Because we love the freedom of having our own cars and resent it when some schmuck tells us we have to ride the bus. Any politician outside of Brooklyn or Berkeley that runs on making car ownership more restrictive in favor of forced public transport will be beaten so badly his own party will never let him sniff a nomination again.
American car culture is just that... a culture, beloved by Americans. There was never any
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> American car culture is just that... a culture, beloved by Americans. There was never any conspiracy by Chevron or Texaco or even Ford to make us buy cars. As soon as we saw them, we went "Fuck, I've got to have that".
Because as we all know, consumers are perfectly rational and it's impossible to convince people they want something that don't need, and impossible to downplay or obscure any negative consequences that may come from acquiring that thing.
Oh wait, reality says it's the exact opposite of tha [wikipedia.org]
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American car culture is just that... a culture, beloved by Americans. There was never any conspiracy by Chevron or Texaco or even Ford to make us buy cars. As soon as we saw them, we went "Fuck, I've got to have that".
Personally, I think this gets to the heart of the matter. It really comes down to how much you think a person is responsible for their own actions in the face of cultural norms that were influenced by the resources of big industry.
On the one hand, you have folks who argue that the Oil industry successfully campaigned, lobbied, advertised, and essentially manipulated people into accepting that this is the culture that we wanted. We all understand that manipulative advertising can be very effective, and it's
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Big Oil and Big Auto worked hand in hand to destroy public transportation in America so that you would have to buy cars
The number of car drivers who wish they could ride a bus is probably smaller than the number of bus riders who wish they owned a car.
Big Oil and Big Auto did not have to conspire to sell the freedom to go anywhere, anytime. It is a pretty awesome thing of it's own accord.
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Buses suck for the same reason as cars currently.
There's too many cars for them to move around effectively.
On top of that buses have all their other inconveniences, but obviously nobody would prefer a bus to a car for themselves.
But, if buses could be good enough that the money saved makes taking them worth it it would make both buses and cars suck less (less traffic).
Let me save you some time (Score:2)
Re: Let me save you some time (Score:2)
Funny! (Score:2)
Finger pointing garbage. (Score:3)
We're so fixated on finding someone to blame that we're going to just keep doing the same shit until we literally make our only habitat unlivable for ourselves, while tossing around lawsuits trying to blame our suppliers for daring to give us what we all use. Not that I think oil companies are innocent snowflakes, but this is a society problem, and it's going to take society changing to fix it. Pointing fingers doesn't accomplish anything other than shuffling funds from one bank account to another, while lawyers soak up the fees in the transaction. How is that doing any good for anyone? Especially while so many of us are still depending on oil to survive and live?
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Not that I think oil companies are innocent snowflakes, but this is a society problem, and it's going to take society changing to fix it.
And oil companies are outside society, right?
Right?
Pointing fingers doesn't accomplish anything other than shuffling funds from one bank account to another
Yeah! Let's never figure out who is to blame, so we can never hold them accountable, and never change anything!
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Not that I think oil companies are innocent snowflakes, but this is a society problem, and it's going to take society changing to fix it.
And oil companies are outside society, right?
Right?
Pointing fingers doesn't accomplish anything other than shuffling funds from one bank account to another
Yeah! Let's never figure out who is to blame, so we can never hold them accountable, and never change anything!
We're all to blame. We all know it's crap, and we're all trapped inside this bubble that forces us to use the crap that's killing us or drop out and live in a cabin in the woods. Spending so much effort on blame-games without any attempt to change behavior is a bullshit game that distracts from making progress toward solutions. Changing *SHOULD* be the priority, but suing everybody in sight doesn't change anything. It just shuffles money around. Which, I get, is priority number one in the age of Greed as Go
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>> so many of us are still depending on oil to survive and live?
What makes you think that's the case? Most oil gets burned into the atmosphere as transportation fuel, and that obviously can be replaced by electric vehicles.
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>> so many of us are still depending on oil to survive and live?
What makes you think that's the case? Most oil gets burned into the atmosphere as transportation fuel, and that obviously can be replaced by electric vehicles.
I live in bumfuck SoDak. I depend on oil to survive. If someone wants to point me to the vehicle I can buy for under 10k today that is electric and will replace my gas guzzler, and actually fit my ape-sized body, great. I'd be all for it. Though I'm normally stuck buying used, and rarely have an extra big chunk of change to also buy a battery after buying a new car when the old one finally dies.
Even if true, entirely irrelevant (Score:3)
Even if they can make such a calculation - which is complete nonsense - it is irrelevant. Extracting and using oil is not in any way illegal, nor has it ever been. Oil products can be, and often are, subject to taxes. However, you cannot make taxes retroactive. So even if you could say that a liter of oil cause $xx in costs, you cannot go back in time to collect that.
But you cannot perform such a calculation anyway! There are far, far too many arbitrary assumptions that you have to make.Aside from the climate hysterics, there is a lot of debate as to the amount of warming caused by CO2, and the extent to which this effect may have already effectively reached saturation. It is in any case a curve where the early increases had a lot more effect than later increases.
Then you have the question of the costs. What costs are those, exactly? Sea levels were already rising, now they rise about 1mm/year faster. Far more significant is the subsidence in coastal cities. New York, for example, is sinking at a rate somewhere between 2mm to 4mm per year. What measures will New York take over the next few decades? No one knows. What will they costs? No idea. What portion of those unknown costs do you assign to CO2? Assumptions built on wild guesses built on fantasies.
Fascinating (Score:2)
Winners and losers (Score:2)
I'll be checking their economic model for the benefit I've received due to lower heating bills. If I don't find it' I'll assume that the rest of their model is broken as well.
They sell the oil, not burn it. You burn it. (Score:2)
This is why capital-S Science is taking a catastrophic reputation hit in the US right now.
The choice to ascribe the blame for emissions to producers rather than consumers of petrochemical fuels is not a scientific one. It is a purely subjective political decision. Calling it scientific is a flat out lie. Period.
Liars see their reputations tarnished. Rightfully so. It serves no one to enlist all of the scientific enterprise in the service of this lie and see its collective reputation also tarnished.
Re: They sell the oil, not burn it. You burn it. (Score:2)
Perhaps blame is not the only word I was looking for. Blame is indeed a political judgement. But so is the choice to ascribe responsibility for emissions only to fuel producers and not to consumers.
This is akin to blaming obesity and heart attacks only on the purveyors of bacon and sugary drinks while leaving blameless the fatasses who stuff their faces and balloon up 300 lbs.
I notice liberals like to do that, actually. Ascribe responsibility in a very one-sided way, that is:
The guy jaywalking at night whil
No they can't. (Score:2)
And they know it.
This is dumb (Score:2)
This is really dumb. I farted since this was calculated now its all off. How many more kids will get asthma now that I passed gas?
Inquiring minds want to know.
No they can't (Score:2)
Going forward (Score:2)
All this retroactive blaming aside, we haven't been operating in an informational vacuum for some time. Placing blame on others is fun and all, I know...
How about we publicly shame and financially punish:
- those who uses generative AI to make a hundred variations of a shitty album cover for music nobody will buy
- those who drive to the grocery store to get one or two items
- anybody buying a $250 or higher graphics card (yes, an arbitrary number, but you need to start somewhere)
- anybody leaving computers of
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Is there even global warming? If you look at charts that go back to the beginning of the planet
You mean when the planet wouldn't have supported human life? Get a better argument, maybe one that wasn't already debunked in the last fucking millenium.
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Stop spreading FUD.
Re:A few critical questions (Score:4, Informative)
The Earth was warmer (and colder) than today during human history.
Yes, briefly.
Pretending that we are currently at a threshold of some critical temperature or CO2 levels that exceeding would endanger life on Earth is unscientific catastrophizing.
These CO2 levels are unprecedented — they are literally orders of magnitude greater than during the periods you're citing as a reason why they aren't a problem.
Stop spreading FUD.
Stop downplaying a crisis.
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These CO2 levels are unprecedented — they are literally orders of magnitude greater than during the periods you're citing as a reason why they aren't a problem.
We have good understanding of CO2 levels on geological scale, there is nothing unprecedented about current CO2 levels. They are increasing from a historical minimum that was hit sometime during the last ice age.
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>> We have good understanding of CO2 levels on geological scale
No we don't. "The most distant period in time for which we have estimated CO2 levels is around the Ordovician period, 500 million years ago."
Accurate measurements from ice cores go back only about 800,000 years.
https://earth.org/data_visuali... [earth.org]
Meanwhile the previous CO2 levels were reached via natural events such as volcanic eruptions and generally happened over the course of thousands or millions of years. What's happening now started at
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CO2 was higher in the past, but we don't know what it was "on geological scale" as you claimed, and the only scant evidence from a few millions of years ago is from fossils in sediments.
But your entire argument is irrelevant. It doesn't matter at all if it was warmer previously or that CO2 was higher due to what obviously was natural causes. It has no bearing on GHG emissions due to human activities over the past couple hundred years and the resulting rapid rise in temperatures.
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The Earth was warmer (and colder) than today during human history.
No.
Most of these variations were local or regional, not global. And we have now vastly surpassed temperatures of the Medieval Warm period.
We have historical and archeological records of forests in Greenland [sciencedaily.com].
From that link,
"Eske Willerslev, a professor at Copenhagen University, has analysed the world's oldest DNA, preserved under the kilometre-thick [Greenland] icecap. The DNA is likely close to half a million years old,"
You'll be hard pressed to find historical records from half a million years ago. But, yes, long ago the Earth had significant variations in temperature comp
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You'll be hard pressed to find historical records
Landnamabok (9th century) describes forests in Greenland, Landnama (12th century) mentions these forests in the past tense. My understanding that Greenland deforestation was the result of sheep grazing that viking settlers introduced to the area. That is, we don't even have to go to Iron Age to have a multi-source record of forests in Greenland.
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The issue is the speed of change. If it takes thousands of years we can adapt to it. If it takes decades you are going to see mass migration and resource wars, along with people dying from the heat, extreme weather, and crop failures.
Right now it's mostly other people feeling the pain, but yours is coming.
Re: A few critical questions (Score:2)
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I heard an estimate of 1B expected climate refugees in the next decade.
Yep, a combination of people who are leaving a place that becomes uninhabitable, and those who are starving because their region has become incapable of producing food because weather has become too chaotic and you can't bring in a crop because of unseasonal hail, or rain, or drought, or any combination of these things following the others in any order.
World isn't ready for that.
And their idea of getting ready is strengthening borders, not building more resilient systems, let alone fighting the actual problem.
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Yep, a combination of people who are leaving a place that becomes uninhabitable, and those who are starving because their region has become incapable of producing food
A lot of places already import most of the food. What about people that are starving because fertilizer cost increases due to carbon taxes resulted in more expensive food costs? I read somewhere, I think UN, that today there is no starvation due to food shortage, the only famines are due to inability to afford food or malice (e.g., blocking of imports by warlords).
Re:A few critical questions - big thumbs up (Score:2)
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Is there even global warming? If you look at charts that go back to the beginning of the planet, it appears as though the global warming conspiracy theorists are rigging the charts by zooming in on the domain and range of the graph every time they post the "hockey stick" chart.
You mean, zooming in on the part that affects us?
Yes, because that's the part that affects us.
Yes, greenhouse effect warming exists, it's well understood. The oil company line has switched away from "question the science" because the questions have all been answered. Get with the times; the new oil company line is "it would be too expensive."
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A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.
With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”
https://heartland.org/opinion/... [heartland.org]
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>> said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts
That guy has been lying about this for decades, and the Heartland Institute is nothing but a shill for Big Fossil.
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A more accurate headline would be: "Climate activists devise a way to justify more taxes on the population by arbitrarily assigning blame on energy companies."
Except it's not. If you want to rail against taxes, carbon taxes are pretty much the smallest of the taxes around. Go complain about sales tax; complain about property tax, complain about income tax; all of these are a hundred times larger. You're complaining about a flea while a wolf is chewing your arm.
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Regressive [Re:This is about money and nothing...] (Score:3)
Carbon taxes are the worst kind of taxes - they are regressive (i.e., poor impacted the most),
Show me where you have been arguing to increase the tax rate on rich people because you are in favor of progressive taxation.
Really, the only time you (and others pushing that line) have ever cared about whether a tax is regressive is when it's an argument to not tax fossil fuels. Who are the people saying that line "don't tax fossil fuels"? Oh, right: that's what the oil companies want.
You really think regressive taxes are the "worst", let's hear your proposal to repeal the tax cuts that dropped the maximu
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Really, the only time you (and others pushing that line) have ever cared about whether a tax is regressive is when it's an argument to not tax fossil fuels.
I am glad we have an expert on what I believe to clear the record.
For the record, I don't believe in intentionally creating or worsening poverty by any means, and that is includes taxation.
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Really, the only time you (and others pushing that line) have ever cared about whether a tax is regressive is when it's an argument to not tax fossil fuels.
I am glad we have an expert on what I believe to clear the record. For the record, I don't believe in intentionally creating or worsening poverty by any means, and that is includes taxation.
You had specifically stated that a regressive tax is "the worst." Go ahead, "for the record" show me where you have argued against regressive taxes in any context other than taxes on fossil fuels.
I'm waiting.
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Admirable, but does not discuss tax rates at all.
As an example of where to look to see your outrage at regressive taxes, the Trump Tax Cuts of 2017 reduced the tax rate on the highest income bracket (over $626K/year) but did not change the tax rate on the low- or middle-income levels. This was explicitly a regressive tax change. Where was your outrage about this?
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Government jacks up the taxes on fuel to try and force me to buy a heat pump or an BEV. With more frequent storms due to climate change I would like to replace my roof with a metal one. I can't afford both, and government is effectively trying to coerce me to spend money against my own interest. Fuck them.
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Aside, when I wa
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Carbon taxes are also play heavily into housing construction, as both material costs and shipping of materials affected. This results in more expensive homes, which puts downwards pressure on quality of construction as people simply cannot afford to pay more for new homes.
There is a push here to increase the required energy efficiency of new homes through building codes. We also have a massive housing shortage and increasing the cost of new builds only makes it worse. Folks are going to have to choose which is the more pressing problem, and they seem ill-equipped for the task.
Aside, when I was redoing roof on my house I specified high-wind resistance shingles. They cost only slightly more than regular shingles. While not as good as a metal roof, it does get you most of the way there in terms of storm resilience.
I'll check that out, thanks.
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What annoys me is they force people to spend limited funds on mitigation rather than resilience.
It's not a binary choice. They are not mutually exclusive.
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Re: This is about money and nothing else (Score:2)
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Go complain about sales tax; complain about property tax, complain about income tax; all of these are a hundred times larger.
We do. Do you think adding more different taxes goes otherwise unnoticed?
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If they could raise prices, they would have done it already and pocketed the profits.
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If they could raise prices, they would have done it already and pocketed the profits.
Even superficial look at historical oil prices debunks this view. In the past decade oil prices were anywhere between $30 to $200 per barrel, how would you justify the dips? Goodwill of oil companies?
Re: This is about money and nothing else (Score:2)
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Supply and demand.