[Vision2020] Krugman: The Truth, Still Inconvenient

[Joe Campbell]

The first few points strike me as fatalistic. You say "It seems smarter to
me to put our money into emergency preparedness." But your argument seems to
be: "It isn't certain that the catastrophe is going to happen, so let's not
plan for it." In most situations, that sounds irresponsible. In most cases
if someone told you that a catastrophe might happen, you'd prepare for the
catastrophe, right? What is different about this situation? Are you certain
the catastrophe won't happen? Why is it "smarter" to assume the catastrophe
won't happen? It isn't as if you have any evidence that says it won't happen
-- that's not possible. At most, you have the claim that the evidence
doesn't prove that it will happen. But my point was we live in a world where
there are no certainties. If there is any reason at all to think a
catastrophe will happen, we should take that into consideration.

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  It depends.  The cure might just be worse than the disease.  Say we as a
> country manage to curb our emissions over the next 50 years or so, but hurt
> our economy in the process.  Well, China and India will still be belching
> out CO2 at an alarming rate and the CO2 we've already put into the
> atmosphere will mostly still be there.  We'll end up in the same place more
> or less as if we didn't curb our emissions, and we'll have a much weaker
> economy to deal with the threats as they happen.  It seems smarter to me to
> put our money into emergency preparedness, really boost that to the next
> level.  Even if the worst parts of global warming don't happen, we'll still
> be prepared for the disasters that will happen anyway.
>
> Paul
>
> On 04/06/2011 07:00 AM, Joe Campbell wrote:
>
> 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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