In a recent Scientific American article the predictions of the IPCC about AGW and catastrophic climate change may have been, and continue to be, too conservative, and the reality is probably more dire than thought.
And yet the AGW and climate change skeptics/deniers claim just the opposite. The reality is that Big Energy wants people to believe their hype and continue with business as usual until the last drop of "low hanging fruit" is plucked, which will keep their profits steady and then even increase when oil becomes scarce and more expensive to extract. And the newer oil drilling ventures, as well as coal mining and fracking, have dire environmental impacts that may soon make clean water more precious than oil.
Two weeks ago Dr. Will Candler presented at our
loops" that further destabilize the climate. Here are some links to his materials:
Something he said, however, makes me rethink what our priorities should be. In essence, AIUI, there is a fairly large amount of inertia that shows a lag of perhaps 20-50 years, so we are now feeling the effects of our activities in the 1950s to 1970s, during which time we were accelerating our consumption of fossil fuels and drastically increasing concentrations of
greenhouse gases. And even if we stopped this consumption right now, the
effects will continue to worsen for 20 years or more before possibly improving.
My comment was that our priorities should be to take steps to deal with the expected increase in violent storms and droughts and other environmental
events, to protect ourselves from them, because no matter what we do about curbing our influence on climate, we cannot change the inevitable disasters that will happen in the next two decades. We could have built seawalls that would have saved much of the areas devastated by Sandy, at a cost of about
1/4 that which will now be needed to repair the damage, and of course nothing can replace the hundreds of lives that were lost.The problem is that we have become reactive rather than proactive, and our policy of not being willing to spend money in advance to provide protection and rebuild our aging, failing infrastructure, will cost us many times as much in the future. This would also create many more jobs and would be a
boost to the economy as private enterprises will perform much of the work and supply the materials. We cannot afford Draconian cost cutting measures and austerity policies, even if we must use deficit spending for awhile as a Keynesian stimulus.
Of course, we also need to implement the same policies as have been proposed for reducing energy consumption and switching to sustainable and clean energy sources. This will not really impact the expected volatility and severity of climate change and natural disasters, at least for the foreseeable future, but it will help us retain more of our natural resources, such as oil, which are needed for things other than energy. Oil is a precious resource and simply burning it as a "cheap" source of energy is no longer tenable.
Paul