Originally Posted by
steelreserve
The point is knowing your parameters. What math problem are you trying to solve and what are the inputs?
In this case, the only two relevant numbers are the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (X), and the amount of combustible hydrocarbons available to humans (Y). Will X+Y put you over whatever "acceptable" level you should maintain? Well, most climate change arguments just use some open-ended umlimited version of Y, as if you could keep adding CO2 forever. Is that good science?
What are the parameters? Well, let's go back three billion years to the Great Oxygenation Event, immediately before which represented the highest concentration of atmospheric CO2 in history. That is your maximum value of Y. Over the next billion or two years, virtually all of that was converted into free oxygen and single-celled marine life. Almost all of the carbon, in its various forms, ended up in the biosphere or on the ocean floor.
Now, knowing the very specific conditions under which fossil fuels form - how much of that environmental carbon do you think ended up as combustible hydrocarbons, instead of inert things like calcium carbonate or mundane sedimentary rock? All of it?
What else might have affected the amount of hydrocarbons available for man-made climate change? Well, since you're such a big science guy, surely you know that 1 to 3 billion years ago, nothing lived on land, it was all primitive marine organisms. And what else do we know happens on the ocean floor? Well, unless you're a plate tectonics denier, you know that the entire oceanic crust is subducted into the mantle every 250 million years or so and replaced with fresh volcanic rock. Everything else in it is carried into the mantle and destroyed too, which includes organic matter and fossil fuels. Over billions of years, you lose most of your carbon from the environment, and on a long enough timeline, lose so much that you have difficulty sustaining plant life. Most of this happens in the first billion or so years, when there is the largest starting pool of carbon. This process is well known to geologists and astrophysicists as it relates to exoplanetary science, but for some reason (can't imagine why) is largely ignored by climate science. It also explains why very few of the combustible hydrocarbons in existence today are more than ~250 million years old.
So, how much of that original carbon is available to humans, as recoverable, combustible hydrocarbons that will result in man-made climate change? Being generous, we're talking single-digit percentages of the original atmospheric carbon content. Realistically, it may only be 1-2%. A piddling amount in comparison with irreversible natural processes that have already taken place. And that is what we are obsessing over.
Will that be enough to render the planet inhospitable? Why, thankfully, we have all of those wonderful examples of past climates, that you pointed out while trying to flex your intellectual muscle, that demonstrate no, you cannot cause a climate disaster by restoring a small percentage of that CO2 to the atmosphere. Yes, you can cause changes, the laws of thermodynamics make that indisputable. But it will be more of a climate inconvenience than a climate emergency.
I remember having this same conversation about 10 years ago with a woman I know who is an honest to god climate researcher; spends half her time in places like Alaska and Norway measuring ice melt. You could see the gears turning in her head, with the kind of alarm of somebody questioning whether the last several years of their life had been meaningless, and how that could be possible over something so simple. Yet the math doesn't lie. In the end, she was reduced to, "OK, there might not be drastic climate change, but it's still important to study the side effects of smaller changes." The inevitable conclusion among almost any climate change advocate who has been willing to engage in honest discussion, rather than angrily reciting doctrine.
Funny thing is, I am actually more of an environmentalist than most people you would find. I am just not concerned very much about climate change at all, because of what the scientific evidence says. It is much more concerning that, for example, we have cut down more than half the world's trees, or killed two-thirds of the fish, or generate alarming amounts of trash. But those things do not get the same attention because they are specific problems with specific solutions, not a mysterious boogeyman that can be used as a blanket justification for all sorts of odd behaviors and policies. In that sense, it is far more similar to a superstition or a religious doctrine than a scientific principle. Hundreds of years from now, historians will look back at all the bizarre rituals people performed in the name of climate change, in much the way we look back at people who did dances and used holy water to try to cure the plague, or any number of similar instances where they tried foolish measures to prevent something they didn't understand.
So, what is the end result here? By all means, you should be thanking me, because you can rest easy that you no longer have to worry about one of your greatest concerns. But instead, you will probably just be mad, because you would rather hold on to all that fear, and you couldn't bear to admit that the answer is so simple, or that anyone without a PhD and lifelong career in science (other than you, of course, you are special) could grasp scientific principles. "But I'm sure that's a little much for you to comprehend."
Commence the yeah-buts.