Re: [Phys-L] How to deal with climate change?

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 10/13/2014 10:16 AM, Savinainen Antti wrote:
> A new review paper was just published in Physics Today on how to
> deal with climate change. The author is an expert in the field and
> he states the following (no surprises here): people are causing
> Earth's climate to change. This conclusion is "extremely solid
> scientifically because it comes from multiple independent lines of
> evidence". He then goes on to discussing various ways to deal with
> climate change:
>
> <http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/67/10/10.1063/PT.3.2548>

Yes, that's a really nice paper.

I like that he includes a section on the political obstacles
(although I think he over-politely understates the gravity
of these problems).

I also like the Venn diagram early on.

I particularly like this passage:

> > We simply don’t know — and probably can’t know — precisely how climate
> > will change or how resilient our society will be to the impacts that
> > result.

We need to start talking in regional terms, not just purely global
terms.  The sources of the problem are highly variable from region
to region, and then the CO2 spreads globally, and then the effects
are highly variable from region to region.  The disconnect between
cause and effect is part of the problem.

For example, Bangladesh is not emitting all that much CO2.  On the
other hand, it is safe to predict that Bangladeshi society and
culture will not survive.  They are going to get wiped out by sea-
level rise.

Again:

> > We simply don’t know — and probably can’t know — precisely how climate
> > will change or how resilient our society will be to the impacts that
> > result.

History tells us that it is very hard to predict how a society
will respond to stress.

  By way of analogy, it is easy to point to a stand of trees
  and say "they were killed by beetles".  That may be true in
  some narrow sense, but it at the same time it completely misses
  the point, because if the trees had not been stressed by climate
  change they would have been able to fight off the beetles.

a) In the same way one could glibly say that European civilization
collapsed and the Dark Ages lasted for 1000 years beginning with 
the sack of Rome because of Alaric.  Even to the extent that 
that's partly true, it completely misses the point, because if 
the civilization hadn't already been under stress it could have
fought off Alaric.  I seem to recall some guy named Gibbon wrote 
a 3600 page analysis of this.

b) Things get interesting when you consider that sometimes a society
can survive extreme stress.  I call particular attention to the
Hundred Years War, which on the grand scale of things did not
cause all that much immediate change.  And oh by the way in the 
middle of the war there was a plague that killed off 2/3rds of 
the population of Normandy and 1/3rd of the population of England.

Combining (a) and (b) it's clear that no simple theory can
predict what's going to survive and what's not.  Except for
Bangladesh.

======

If you buy Gibbon's argument that the #1 key factor was corruption,
selfishness, and general lack of "civic virtue" in the Roman ruling
classes, then we today are in big trouble.