More Global Warming from Dilbert

He comes to some conclusions:

1. The earth is getting warmer, and human activity is an important part of it. I base this conclusion on the lack of credible peer reviewed work to the contrary and the mountain of work that confirms human-induced warming. While individual studies might be wrong, it’s extremely unlikely the entire field has been so thoroughly duped.

2. There is plenty of bullshit on both sides of the issue. The people arguing that humans are not causing relatively rapid rises in temperatures are under-informed, misinformed, or suffering from bad thinking and bad analogies.

3. The people who are well-informed about global warming are overstating the case by conflating the well-studied fact of human-created warming with the less-than-certain predictions of what happens because of the extra warming. And there’s a tendency to leave out the “why I might be wrong” parts of the argument. I call that bullshit.

4. The people who say global warming is irrelevant because we should all be recycling and using less fossil fuel for other reasons anyway don’t understand the size of the problem. Ordinary conservation in the industrialized nations won’t put a dent in it.

5. The people predicting likely doom because of global warming have not made their case. Humans are incredibly adaptive. And technological breakthroughs happen in steps, not predictable straight lines. Every other predicted type of global doom hasn’t happened because of human resourcefulness. No climate model can predict human resourcefulness.

6. Some say that even a small chance of worldwide catastrophe is worth the “insurance” of working to reduce the risk to zero, even at astronomical expense. But how small is a “small” risk? And how does the risk of global warming stack up to the other global risks for which we could use our limited resources? That’s where I hit the wall on my understanding of the issue.

My best guess for the future is that global warming continues, conservation doesn’t take hold in the less developed countries because of simple economics and corruption, and something “big” has to be done by the richest players. I think that something “big” will be mammoth carbon dioxide “scrubbers” to clean the atmosphere. It’s technically possible, but not economical. The economical part will either be solved or become a moot point if the alternative is global annihilation.

The Y2K scenario is a bad analogy to global warming but it’s instructive in one minor way. When there’s a certain deadline, humans can meet it more effectively than you might think. Global warming hasn’t given us the two-minute warning yet. When it does, I like our odds.