We have just as much of a chance of making our situation worse as we do helping it. We just don’t know enough about our climate, how it works, and don’t have enough data to make proper assessments nor adjustments to make a difference.

I’m not understanding the report as well as I’d like and comments about this at RealClimate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/irreversible-does-not-mean-unstoppable/
are loaded with political interpretations but I think in some ways this supports my “mostly ignore it” idea.

This noncontroverial study shows that even if CO2 emissions go to zero….today…. the effects on the climate are not reverseable and will continue for 1000 years regardless of our actions today.

Although his views remain unpopular in climate science circles Lomborg has been talking along the lines of what this study shows for some time. ie Reducing *todays* CO2 is at best a delay tactic, slowing future warming by a trivial amount. This study shows that even if we could stop all CO2 and pull billions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere we’d *still* have most of the problems people are projecting we’ll have now.

As always you *can* make a case that we should do some mitigation because more pollution will bring more climate and other problems, but I think this paper weakens the case for immediate and heavy handed action to avoid huge looming catastrophes.

Yes, I’m very interested in any comments critical of my interpretation.

Because very bad things are looming.

The more I study the catastrophist ideas the less credible they are to me – they generally take the form of only looking for evidence to support the catastrophe hypothesis (e.g. Arctic Sea ice shrinking), while ignoring other signals (Antarctic sea ice growing). The absurd form of this, now common, is for journalists to point to global warming when there is a dry spell or hot day in an area. This is so preposterous it remains incredible to me that most climate scientists continue to tolerate the nonsensical claims that this type of artifact provides us with evidence for climate change. In fact most evidence shows a current and temporary cooling trend despite what is very likely an overall warming trend.

Yes Max. This notion makes me cozy, and globally warm, because it’s something almost everybody can all agree about and work towards.

I go by gut feeling quite a lot as you can probably tell, but I have a lot of generalized information to draw on. My feeling is that Pearce is being conservative, and it has little to do with Al Gore’s charts. Humans are a big force on this planet and getting larger exponentially fast. That’s not just population, but resource use- mostly in the form of fossil fuel exploitation becoming globalized rapidly. The third world’s race to become SUV-driving Walmart shoppers to rival us will have major consequences. Maybe it’s from reading a lot of sci-fi- especially Kim Stanley Robinson- but rapid climate change seems highly plausible to me considering the inputs. The only thing I see possibly saving us from a significant climate shift is running out of the fuels that are causing the trouble, but I don’t see that happening nearly fast enough, not to mention that that is an even bigger nightmare in its own way. Out of the frying pan… That’s why investing in the fight to mitigate climate change could be crucial, and why Gore’s message is so valuable regardless of his attempts to sell the message through highlighting the worst case scenarios.

Fortunately, the best technology improvements to mitigate climate change will be the ones to cut off the source of the problem- clean, sustainable, non-fossil fuels for heating, electrical generation, and transportation, etc. Could it help us navigate the passage twixt Scylla and Charybdis? Not probable, but possible, and one should consider the alternatives. It’s likely we’ll be swallowed by both monsters at once at the current rate.