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ElwoodBlues · M
Here's another way to look at climate change; thru the lenses of probability and cost benefit analysis.
The total stock capitalization of American businesses traded on the stock exchanges is around $48 trillion. Someone on Quora calculated the land & resource value of the whole USA at $5000 trillion. So I don't think it's unreasonable to value US seaside land buildings & infrastructure at the very round number of $100 trillion.
If you are CEO of a $100 trillion corporation, and some of your people are telling you the whole thing could be flooded in 20 years or 40 years or whatever, what's the prudent thing to do? Answer: ask for cost benefit analyses.
This approach removes the whole "religious war" aspect of the question and focuses on insurance style calculations.
What are the cost estimates for protecting your $100 trillion from floods, and what's a reasonable probablility estimate that the doomsayers are correct? The religious war approach pins those probabilities at 0% and 100%, but suppose you allow a 25% probability that the doomsayers are correct, or, alternatively, that they're only 25% correct (25% is just for the sake of argument; I'm not married to the figure).
With that assumption, you now have $25 trillion at risk, so what's the prudent amount to spend to insure that $25 trillion?
A quick google says homeowners insurance costs about $3300/yr for each $1 million of value. Scaling to $25 trillion, that works out to $82 billion per year, or a 12 year investment of about $1 trillion.
So there's nothing outlandish about a ten year one trillion dollar green energy plan, especially given that the plan includes plenty of jobs, infrastructure upgrades, and goods purchased from American businesses.
The total stock capitalization of American businesses traded on the stock exchanges is around $48 trillion. Someone on Quora calculated the land & resource value of the whole USA at $5000 trillion. So I don't think it's unreasonable to value US seaside land buildings & infrastructure at the very round number of $100 trillion.
If you are CEO of a $100 trillion corporation, and some of your people are telling you the whole thing could be flooded in 20 years or 40 years or whatever, what's the prudent thing to do? Answer: ask for cost benefit analyses.
This approach removes the whole "religious war" aspect of the question and focuses on insurance style calculations.
What are the cost estimates for protecting your $100 trillion from floods, and what's a reasonable probablility estimate that the doomsayers are correct? The religious war approach pins those probabilities at 0% and 100%, but suppose you allow a 25% probability that the doomsayers are correct, or, alternatively, that they're only 25% correct (25% is just for the sake of argument; I'm not married to the figure).
With that assumption, you now have $25 trillion at risk, so what's the prudent amount to spend to insure that $25 trillion?
A quick google says homeowners insurance costs about $3300/yr for each $1 million of value. Scaling to $25 trillion, that works out to $82 billion per year, or a 12 year investment of about $1 trillion.
So there's nothing outlandish about a ten year one trillion dollar green energy plan, especially given that the plan includes plenty of jobs, infrastructure upgrades, and goods purchased from American businesses.
ElwoodBlues · M
but I've yet to hear a rational explanation of how miniscule increases in an atmospheric trace gas such as CO2, causes the earth to warm.
It's because CO2 & methane are transparent to visible light but more opaque to infrared. The solar energy comes pouring in via the visible spectrum, but the heat can't leave so easily via the infrared spectrum due to that opacity. Kids' version:https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-co2-and-other-greenhouse-gases
idealized quantitative model: https://www.climate-policy-watcher.org/coriolis-force/a-simple-mathematical-model-of-the-greenhouse-effect.html In order to actually prove human carbon emissions influence climate, all variables would have to remain constant
Nope. With multiple data points we can solve for multiple variables simultaneously. Detailed climate models account for all the variables you list and more. They are verified and calibrated based on 700,000 years of prior climate data. 
http://web.mit.edu/globalchange/www/climate.html Global warming models are based on small amounts of data. The earth is 4.6 billion years old, and we are expected to believe they can draw conclusions based on a hockey stick graph with 50 years of data?
Nope, not 50 years, 700,000 years, covering about 7 ice ages. The climate data comes from bubbles in glacial ice, and is corroborated by data from sea floor sediments.https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores
Here's where the various data sets were collected:
The most salient thing about the 700,000 years of climate data is the rate of change during those previous 7 ice ages compared to the current rate of change this century.
Where does the money for climate research come from?
Fair question. Equally fair: where does the money for climate denial come from? The US oil industry makes about $110 billion per year; coal another $20 billion. Big Oil spends $3.6 billion per year on advertising; a sum equal to about 8X the whole NSF climate budget. You're not naive enough to believe none of that money goes to propaganda, are you?
ElwoodBlues · M
Are glaciers shrinking? What does the photographic evidence say?
Muir Glacier, Alaska
Muir Glacier and Inlet, Alaska, 1880s and 2005
Carroll Glacier, Alaska, 1906 and 2004
Grinnell Glacier, Montana, 1926 and 2008
Bear Glacier from space 1980. 1989, 2011
Bear Glacier from the air 2002, 2007
Glacier shrinkage driving global changes in downstream systems
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1619807114
Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z
Muir Glacier, Alaska
Muir Glacier and Inlet, Alaska, 1880s and 2005
Carroll Glacier, Alaska, 1906 and 2004
Grinnell Glacier, Montana, 1926 and 2008
Bear Glacier from space 1980. 1989, 2011
Bear Glacier from the air 2002, 2007
Glacier shrinkage driving global changes in downstream systems
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1619807114
Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z
Using largely untapped satellite archives, we chart surface elevation changes at a high spatiotemporal resolution over all of Earth’s glaciers. We extensively validate our estimates against independent, high-precision measurements and present a globally complete and consistent estimate of glacier mass change. We show that during 2000–2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267 ± 16 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to 21 ± 3 per cent of the observed sea-level rise6. We identify a mass loss acceleration of 48 ± 16 gigatonnes per year per decade, explaining 6 to 19 per cent of the observed acceleration of sea-level rise.
ElwoodBlues · M
So called "conservative" values no longer include anything to do with conservation. I expect that won't change until it's way too late.
@MarkPaul I hope you won't mind if I use this space to park some climate change info. Thanks!!
@MarkPaul I hope you won't mind if I use this space to park some climate change info. Thanks!!
Joker2019 · 26-30, M
Most of Hollywood for years have been pretending to be climate change experts as well as politicians, yet none of them are.