[Vision2020] Krugman: The Truth, Still Inconvenient

[Joe Campbell]

There is a possibility of a catastrophe, right? Don't you think it would be
wise to take that into consideration? I guess the point of my last post was
you don't need to prove that human beings are the ONLY cause of rises in
CO2; and you don't need to prove that rises in CO2 WILL lead to a
catastrophe. It would be relevant if we had SOME impact and if there was
SOME chance of catastrophe, or if we could substantially lessen the chance
and make the world a better place for our children. I just don't see why we
have to be certain that there is going to be a catastrophe in order to take
action. Very few things in life are certain. We live by rules of
probabilities and those of us who act responsibly act to ensure there is no
catastrophe even if the odds are low.

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On 04/04/2011 09:15 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:
>
>> That 3 & 4 are plants seems debatable. Less replace them with:
>>
>> 3'. Mankind has some influence and impact
>>
>> 4'. We'd be better off with less pollution and fewer CO2 emissions
>>
>> Does this make me a skeptic? Fine.
>>
>> The issue is what can/do we do?
>>
>>
> I would agree with 3, and most of 4 (I'm ambivalent towards CO2, until I'm
> convinced, but fully behind lowering pollution).
>
> What can we do is the essence of the problem, and is why I think global
> warming has such a foothold.  It's easy to blame the fatcat oil executives
> smoking their cigars and orchestrating the demise of civilization for their
> own twisted amusement.  Or to blame the idiot in the Hummer that
> aggressively sped past you.
>
> If it's just Mother Nature, then what can we do?  The only thing we can
> really do is keep our heads down, try not to anger the gods, and prepare
> ourselves as much as possible for disaster to strike.  And that's the key
> reason this topic strikes such a chord with me.  If the emphasis were on
> preparing for food shortages, evacuations, flooding, etc, I'd be OK with it.
>  It never hurts to prepare.  But that's not where the emphasis is.  It's on
> carbon credit swap schemes and other exotic financial systems.  Some of them
> brought to you by the same people that gave us Enron.
>
> Based on just that bit of knowledge, I'm skeptical that anyone other than
> some grassroots folks that are admirably trying to save the world from doom
> (like Ted) is really serious about this.  Where are the warehouses full of
> grain to hedge against climate changes that might cause short-term famine?
>  Where are they building seawalls or dikes in case the water comes up higher
> than it ever did before?  Where are the nuclear engineers starting to break
> ground to build new nuclear reactors?
>
> I think our focus is on the wrong thing, and that if it changed to
> preparedness instead of emissions reduction, we'd all be better off.  And
> you'd probably get more people on the bandwagon to boot.
>
> Paul
>
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