Almost daily Corner bashing: Planet Gore edition

Jim Manzi from Planet Gore writes this in comments:

You said that:

"..it seems pretty clear to me that both of Manzi's positions are both unsupportable and dangerous."

What I had said is:

"What's a lot less settled is the actual sensitivity to CO2, the trade-offs between mitigation and adaption, etc."

So I hadn't said (1) "that carbon dioxide really isn't that big a deal", just that the science about temperature sensitivity to CO2 is a lot less settled than the fact that it is >0.

I wrote a fairly long article about why I believe this if you are really interested:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmViY2Y3YzY1YmVkYTg4NjczODhkYWU1Mjg1YzhjMTI=

I also hadn't said (2) that adaptation should be pursued independent of mitigation, just thatt eh trade-offs are non-obvious.

Indeed I think everybody should read that article, because it presents a much less strident entry in the great global warming debate than anything you'll read on my blog or on Planet Gore. That said, the science is very clear--carbon is not nearly as powerful a greenhouse gas as many other pollutants are, but, thanks to human emissions, it's present in so much greater abundance in our atmosphere than are other, stronger gases that it is (and will continue to be) the culprit here.

I'd also like to dispute the idea that there are serious tensions between pursuing mitigative and adaptive policies in the face of global warming, and the contention that those tensions ought to be studied before action is taken on both fronts. Writing about potential "trade-offs" between the two means that either you favor pursuing one (adaptive) over the other (mitigative) or that you want to do little until the question that nobody's asking--is there a trade-off between adapting and mitigating?--is answered.

But now that that's clarified a bit, let me just quote the last sentence of Manzi's comment: "More broadly, I think that the whole idea of "denying" AGW is counter-productive (because it's obviously wacky on the science), and conservatives should just move on to the question of addressing the problem." This is the second time I've been surprised to learn from Manzi that, really, Planet Gore writers are not all that blase about global warming, and are certainly not part of the Inhofe crowd of people who by all rights are the natural antagonists of real environmentalists. If Manzi and his colleagues think that there's a "problem" that needs to be "addressed", then they should say so, and stop making themselves the, yes, bedfellows of people who are "wacky on the science" either because they're stupid or corruptfor fairly reprehensible rea

Comments

[Jim Manzi]

Brian:

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.

I don't think its productive for us to have a scientific debate in this forum, but I'll leave it at the observation that I think we shuld probably remain humble about our ability to solve an incredibly hard scientific problem, namely predicting climate impacts 100 years from now.

I should have written more precisely about adaptation and mitigation. As you have said, doing more of one does not require doing less of the other. In fact, again as you have said, they are probably mutually reinforcing. The only "trade-off" is that if you think you can tackle part of the problem with one, that is a part of the problem for which you don't have to use the other method. In general, and there are exceptions, I think that adaptation is almost always cheaper than mitigation (with current technologies).

In terms of Planet Gore, there are a variety of people with somewhat different viewpoints. That said, if you look at the bulk of the most frequent posters, I think you will see that we all quite forthright that A>0, and that the key issues are uncertainties in predicting the future, and defining effective ways of dealing with the risks that this implies.

Of course, we all disagree with Al Gore about many of his policy proposals in this area, and have different ideas about what should be done.

In general, I think that both "sides" of this debate live on the same planet and should focus on being more practical than ideological.