The Stern Report: Global Warming to cost $7 trillion dollars
 

One of the multitude of sources reporting this
What shits me the most, is that it's the private sector primarily responsible for this. The oil companies, energy companies, logging companies, all heavy industries, yet you can bet they won't be footing the bill.

And if you have some time on your hands. The full, 700 page report can be found here.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/indepe...iew_report.cfm

Man's involvement in global warming might be disputed, yet the fact, that there is no endless supply of these resources is not. Considering that the very plastic of the keyboards we all use to post here is gained through the alteration of petroleum, a final shortage of fossil fuels will not just become an issue regarding house warming and transportation.

You're speaking like things like Carbon composites and Carbon Nanotubes don't exist. There are plenty of materials that don't involve petroleum based production methods. In fact, there's are fields of science and engineering devoted to this: Materials Science and Materials Engineering.

I've been hearing a lot about global warming possibly being caused by a naturally occuring cycle. Considering the stakes, isn't it dangerous for scientists and regular people who side with that theory to assume that it is 100% correct? Since it's our planet that is on the line, wouldn't it be better to play it safe and start cutting back on emissions and stuff rather than jeopordize the future with a "maybe?"

Sure, they exist, but how do they fare in comparision with fossil based plastics in terms of production costs?

I think that people still have the wrong idea if they are worried about the economic costs they have to suffer from global warming

Yeah! Goddamn oil companies. How dare they provide us with what we want? It's inconceivable. :mad:

It's depressing because I know that the country most likely to be flooded will be Bangladesh, and that means all my relatives will be displaced.

;__;

I wonder how they come up with numbers like that. Not to mention the per-person break down cost of that if we factored in every person living in the industrialized world. Oh yeah, and how do we know we haven't already started paying down on that?

Too many questions, so few answers.

It's not their jobs to pay for that. They exist solely to provide a product at the lowest cost possible. It's not like they won't expend their profits in the pursuit of that though. Their very survival might depend on it. The oil companies have their infrastructure at risk. Billions, perhaps trillions at risk.

A little alarmist, don't you think? Guess not. Oh well, at least the future has never looked brighter if you're bacteria. :)

Precisely right mate. If we act like it matters and it turns out it doesn't, oh well. If we act like it doens't matter and it does, FUCKED.
Anyway, anyone siding with the whol "natural occurance" line, could you provide some kind of link or soemthing to an oil company sponsered research paper? It'd be nice to see.
Personally I don't unerstand how it COULDN'T be our fault.
We know that greenhouse gasses keep our Earth warm
We know what the gasses are
We know that we are constantly pumping them into the sky
We know that we are cutting down or worse, burning entire forests who would normally turn these gases back into oxygen.
Yeah one of the things the report mentions is taht it's the poorer nations who will be hit hardest and hit first. It's pretty disgusting. Esepcially when you have Vanuatu, a nation who had to AIRLIFT ENTIRE VILALGES to higher ground a few years back due to rising water levels, meanwhile, Australia who bullys then entire oceania region is just next door and also the highest per capita polluter in the world.
This is true. Unfortunately we have to speak in what I like to call "Conservative Terms", you know, make them fear a flood of refugees and economic meltdown.
Somehow with 700 pages in the report. I think they might go into those details for you.

Huh? Nuclear Power is more than a thousand times more efficient per kilogram. Produces a hell of a lot less waste too.

And yet the waste it produces is very difficult to get rid of safely and can take thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years for it to fully decay. Still, it's probably our best option right now.

What could happen is instead of an end all be all alternative, maybe employing many of the alternatives we have on a regional scale. Solar power wouldn't be ideal for places that have alot of rain and cloud cover, however an airid climate like the Southwestern United States and Middle East could benefit greatly from solar power. A place with alot of wind such as the Widwest U.S. would benefit from windpower. Then of course there's the alternative with ethonal.

The biggest issue with nuclear waste is separating its components. I don't mean being able to separate high level waste from low level waste so we only have a tiny amount of material to store (relative to the energy it's been used to produce), but I mean separating the actual high level waste into the various stuff it's made off. If we were able to do this, then there'd be a number of advantages: First of all, you'd be able to remove the stuff that's extremely radioactive but decays fast from the stuff that decays much more slowly. In other words, you might be able to reduce further the space you need to store your highly radioactive waste in the long term, since the stuff that decays fast could be kept for a few years until it literally disappears, and for that you wouldn't need underground storage. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there seem to be some fission by-products which are extremely dangerous, but which could actually be converted into harmless, or at least much less dangerous stuff, if it could be separated from the rest of the waste. If you can treat a large part of your waste that way, then you'll end up with very little stuff to dispose off, or you might even find actual uses for it as radiation sources, among other things. It might even be possible to completely get rid of it some day.

I remember reading about this a few years ago in a science magazine. One of the biggest problem is that research is somewhat difficult due to the fact that not too many labs are equiped to handle nuclear waste and perform experiements on it ranging from testing chemical processes to stuff involving lasers. No private industry could justify the cost, and very few government really have an interest in funding that research. I believe that the french were working on it, not so surprisingly, but they were stuck at the separation part. And since I haven't heard about this in some time, I have to idea if they've made much progress.

In the meantime, I suppose we'll have to be content with burying our waste. Unless black gold and its cousins somehow last forever, something unlikely, there isn't that much other choice since all sun-based energy sources (in which I include wind, hydro, solar, fossil fuels, ethanol, which all ultimately get their energy from the sun) have various problems in costs (which often means efficiency), scalability or simply the fact they won't last long enough. And then there's the whole pollution thing which a lot of them produce.

Not hardly. I don't think that this report or the people who wrote it are omnipotent. The report just by reading the relevant chapters footnote's is disappointing, nor much different then other estimates.

Chapter V, (which is only 21 pages long) which is what should probably be the most important to people living in the industrialized world has no accurate grasp of how much it could cost. Many times it states that higher temperatures will possibly lead to higher costs with no real attempt to elaborate. They don't even bother guessing. If that's even possible to accurately guess. It just states the obvious in all of it's vagueness.

So really, this is just an alarmist piece for the British government. And a wake-up piece for the rest of us.

Isn't the cost-per-kilowatt for nuclear power somewhere around $4-5K? I heard solar and wind power come in at about 1-2K.

For starters... If you are a believer in global warming, things won't flood overnight. It'd take decades for changes to effect things.

Secondly, there is such thing as a scatter plot. There are times when things are heating up, there are times when things are cooling down. There have been on-and-off cycles of global warming blame games for decades. You even had the earliest ones in the 20's-30's.

Plus, you can't predict these values. You know what that article is, right? Just another fear-tactic that keeps getting poured down peoples' throats. Show me a fucktard who thought that the pessimist's "worst-case-scenario" scene of global warming would be cheap. Either way, I don't buy into the fact that mankind is causing this.

There have been ice ages at points in the past when CO2 and other greenhouse gases were at their peak. Let's also not forget that increasing CO2 does not necessarily perpetuate global warming. Shoddy computer models have run this along and they don't take into account a number of causal mechanisms that arise once certain parameters are met. For example, once enough water vapor is in the atmosphere (most effecting greenhouse gas), the atmosphere becomes a literal shield from sunlight and causes things to cool down very fast.

Our combustible engines have become much more efficient and emission levels are down. As for countries like China, they don't have the luck with that yet. Still, let's not forget how many "emissions" are unloaded into the atmosphere from every volcanic eruption. It's naive to think that we're melding the atmosphere like play-dough. The atmosphere has evolved over BILLIONS of years. And very, very, VERY slowly. What makes you think that a little over 100 years of burning fossil fuels will suddenly spell doomsday?

Blaming oil companies for this is just juvenile. There is a demand for energy and they're getting it. High gas prices? Supply & Demand.

Well duh.

Ahh the conspiracy argument.
What would anyone have to gain by predicting environmental catastrophe? Yet there are plenty of people who would continue to gain maintaining the status quo.

Really?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ature-plot.png
Incorrect. Suns rays intially penetrate the greenhouse gases becuase they are a much higher frequency than that which resonates with the gases. Heat radiated back from the earth is a lower frequency, this is what the greenhouse gases trap and re-radiate back to earth.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Stu...ges/co2_rt.gifVolcanic eruptions have not been this nice and gradual. Call me naive but something is going on here.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ss_Balance.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ure_Record.png
http://clinton4.nara.gov/media/gif/Figure4.gif
Here's something which doesn't seem to have any effect.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...cycle-data.png

*cracks fingers*

What would people gain from Global Warming pushing? Easy. Researchers get more money. If some climatologist or meteorologist is assigned to find out whether Global Warming is occurring or not along with how to prevent it if it is, then he will lean toward the result that will give him a better meal ticket. Global warming is very much politics-meets-science. If he says "no, it's false" then Doc loses grants, as folks will lose interest in it. "Oh, nothings wrong? Ok. Forget about it." But if he says "doooooooooom," people start throwing money at him saying "find out about it."

If you do not believe me, then you obviously haven't met enough "research-rats" as I call them. I went to an AGU conference last winter and I learned something: tons of folks doing research are just working to keep their head above water. They will eyeball the smallest most redundant points and even fib about data just to keep things rolling and obtain more grant money. I have this view formed from personal experience. Not everyone is like that, but the global warming crutch seems to be much the same. I lost my job in the Meteorology department due to funding being moved to elsewhere. Interest was taken away from aerosol particles that form rain clouds and put into global warming research funding. As a result, my boss lacked the money to continue his research and has been sitting on his hands somewhat ever since. And this was all due to that Day After Tomorrow movie scare. Folks were pressing more and more for research on it and it all got sucked up.

Now. To counter your pictures...

Yes. There are points where CO2 is at max and glaciation is occurring. It is when water vapor (the big player in greenhouse gases) disrupts the albedo effect. As a result, sunlight cannot get into the atmosphere. You can see CO2 as an insulation that heats things up, this is true. But enough water vapor forms a shell per se that sunlight can't get through very well.

You say incorrect, but there is a Dr. North here at A&M who would beg to differ. I suggest you look up on him if you doubt me. I've had long discussions with him about global warming in the past. I'm not talking out of my ass on this issue.

CO2 rises are in fact due to heating. There is a heating effect going on right now, but it is not man-caused Global Warming. Every couple years folks say it's getting hotter. It's getting colder. It's brightening. It's dimming. They're like scared chickens. Do you want the big picture of things here?

The last major ice age ended 10,000 years ago. Following a glaciation period is a period of warming. Things heat up and melt ice. Water vapor gets into the atmosphere and disrupts the albedo effect, causing the surface of the Earth to get very, very cold. As a result of this, ice ages take place. Slowly throughout the ice age, the C02 levels lower (as the CO2 gets caught in ice deposits), and enough vapor freezes so that the atmosphere clears up. Albedo effect resumes, begins to melt ice, CO2 levels begin to rise. Wash, rinse, repeat.

So this must be why you IMed me yesterday. :p

Just as a side note, carbon fiber reinforced polymers are considered roughly 4-5x more environmentally harmful than steel, twice as harmful as virgin aluminum (many more times if the aluminum is recycled), and anywhere from 2-10x more harmful than most common polymers (plastics, rubbers, and lots of other synthetics). CFRP also has one of the highest emission rates of CO2 per ton of any material out there, I believe.

But yeah, us MSE people are working on less costly/ecologically friendly methods of producing things, though it's usually pretty hard since you just have to replace one bad thing with something that (currently) is believed to be slightly less bad.

Edit: Rab, could you also explain what http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ure_Record.png means? I'm not too up on my climatology, so what does "Temperature Anomoly" mean in the graph's context?

Hey, that's funny! I was just reading about a report by some economists saying that dealing with global warming was a bad idea!

---

As regards climate change debates, you know why so many of the anti-climate-change people turn out to be shell agencies with official-sounding names, parroting old and countered arguments? Some big industries took a page out of the tobacco playbook: create enough "argument" among "experts" in the public domain so that things will appear ambiguous. In ambiguity, the American people will prefer to do nothing.

That's a nice theory Gechmir but how do you suppose scientists managed to convince the global temperature and polar ice caps to conform to their greedy money grab?

Also I looked up this guy and your University. I poked around the site some more and then in Donor Salutes I found something interesting.
Now there's a conspiracy!

How much the temperature deviates from the historical average. For example, in 1860 the average global temperature was .4 degrees below the historical average.
Last year was 0.5 above the average.

By not mentioning that this is a regular occurrence. There are folks who are slapping the blame-game on burning of fossil fuels as if the atmosphere had never changed in the history of this planet. As I said, things are heating up but it is natural and not caused by mankind. If they mentioned it is natural, there won't be as much fear and research into it. All the "proof" of mankind causing this is full of holes.

Your "conspiracy" prod is laughable. A&M is a big supplier of manpower to the energy industry. And many former students from A&M feel obliged to donate money to the university. It's quite a good one, y'know.

Predicting Rab's next post: "you're going into the oil industry. You must be a conspirator."

I'm aware that temperature flucuations are a regular occurance. Normally I wouldn't suggest that donor funding reaches further and is controlling university research but you brought up such a hiliarious propisition; that scientists are blaming humanity for their own personal gain that I couldn't help it.

My real problem with your post is this
As if smokestacks and car exausts didn't exist while we systematically deplete the world's forests. I really don't buy your idea that CO2 levels are increasing BECAUSE ice is melting, releasing it and water vapour into the atmosphere. Releasing so much in fact that it's overiding our own contributions.

As far as I am concerned, without be arsed to go look up anything, is that at this point Global Warming still an unproven theory, regardless of how bad Al Gore want the world the think he his still relevant.

If I were to believe in global warming, it would mean that I would have to forget that when I walk outside today it is cool/cold autumn weather.

you may not notice an over all global 2 or 3 degree drop, but it effects the world enough. I think that people who say that everything is just a natural cycle (sugh as glaciers all over the world melting at an alarming rate) are just trying to justify what they know is wrong in the first place (like being in flat Miami beach and seeing huge SUVs). I'm not trying to say that it's going be dooms day or anything, and that we should all repent, but I think that it's a big issue that can't be ignored or pidgin holed for ever. I believe that soon we will see the effects.

Or people with Meteorological & Geological know-how. Read the whole thread before lobbing out some random thought like that please. We are in a heating stage. Things are heating up, but they'll back off and then heat up again. Scatter-plot. Simple. There will be a linear trend, yes. But don't go thinking that we're going to chug right into superheating the world within a matter of a couple years all because of the big bad evil SUVs.

RABicle --
Pardon me for making it seem "hilarious," but I am going off of my own personal experiences. I've spoken with individuals who admitted to me that they don't put out the truth because they would lose lots of funding. They put a spin on their research so more grant-givers will be interested. This is something I've noticed and experienced first-hand. Research bias, pure and simple. If you do not want to accept my personal experience as proof enough for this thought process, I don't know what to say to you then.

Hmmm. I think that Global Warming is indeed an issue, and I'm sure it will cost alot to fix it. But on the other hand, I also believe that we are on a natural warming trend, it happens every 20,000 years or so if I have read correctly. So I think we are indeed contributing to it, but certainly not as much as Al Gore thinks. Personally, I don't think we can stop the Earth from doing what it needs to do. Do we know for sure what the ramifications of Global Warming really are?
Like I said though, I believe it is mostly a natural occurence of the planet that would have happened anyway. If you show me a graph from 20,000 years ago off a cave wall that shows the rate of temperature change then you might prove me wrong, but good luck finding that. I don't think the issue should be viewed from a political stand point because politicians recruit scientists to provide answers and then the politicians don't show all of them. Oh well, there's nothing we can do about it now.

This is my bitch for the day...

I'm an Aussie and proud of it but my government is being so incredibly stupid when it comes to climate control. will not join kyoto and are basically waiting till some thing better comes along. Hellooooooo ever thought that it will be a little too late then?

aarrgghhhhh i hate this. The impact of climate change can be minised and reduced if people don't hide from it like the aussie goverment

The Kyoto Protocol will have a virtually nonexistant effect on Earth's climate, so what's the point? What's the point in putting yourself through unnecessary economic hardship for little or no gain?

I agree Night Phoenix, it's like paying rent for an apartment with 3 walls. Wait zergkiller, why do you have an American flag on Your thingy there?

The Kyoto Protocol is at least a start. I agree that it won't make much of a difference because the Kyoto targets in terms of emission reduction are so low but ratifying it would at least show an interest by Australia, the US and other countries in the wellbeing of the planet. "Economic hardship"? Get real. The so called hardship we'd go through developing cleaner technologies and cutting emissions barely compares to the real hardship faced by billions of the planet's inhabitants when the polar caps melt and their cities sink into the sea.

Did you goto today's rally zergkiller? I was at the Perth one.

Yeah, it's always "a start" but there's never a plan for what should be done after Kyoto, or how we get the Chinese and Indians to reduce their emissions.

We're not going to damage our economies for a gesture.