It's hot. Get used to it.

You're treating this as if it were merely a rhetorical problem. I don't know what party Samuelson belongs to (he writes about economics), but I -- sadly -- think he's probably right about the inability of mankind to do anything serious about the problem. Which is a tragedy.

Without something miraculous on the horizon - namely a cheap, clean, renewable source of energy - I fear both you and he are correct, Rod.

Almost nobody really takes global warming seriously. I don't know of a single person who has stopped taking pleasure trips (by land or air) because of global warming. Most of the Prius owners I know live in homes that are far bigger than they need (lots of fossil fuel to heat and cool) and roll up huge numbers of miles on those Priuses on weekend fun trips.
All this blame the politicans or blame the corporations stuff is just silly if free individuals won't make changes by themselves. And, expecting poor folks to curb their aspirations for material comfort such as we have is hypocritical beyond belief. Besides which, I'm old enough to remember the 1970's when all the smart people believed that we were entering a new ice age. I'll wait before being convinced on this one.

I say still plan as if you could do something, on the individual level at least. renewable energy such as solar panels and solar water heaters would go along way, especially if fuel prices keep rising (and with China growing they will), it will be a buffer against rising energy prices and green at the same time. It's not like cheap abundant coal magically appears all nice and processed at the power plants afterall, you still have to truck and float it in (gas).

Even though India and China are going to surpass the US as the world's biggest carbon emitters, how do you tell them, "Sorry, you can't have the wealth and stability the US has, because you're heating up the globe"? You don't. I mean, you can, but don't expect them to do anything but smile and you and keep on keeping on. That is a big problem with world trade. 15 years ago China was still an agrarian based society and the main method of transportation was the bicycle. That has changed and as China and India have rapidly industrialized, the stress on the environment has gotten much worse and will continue to get worse. Things are not as rosy as mammon worshipers would have us believe in China. In many regions people have lost their traditional ways of life and have been forced to the cities for the slave labour market. In some regions communities have been forcefully expelled with no compensation. Also, with the low environmental standards, cancer and other health problems have gone off the map. Not to mention an ever widening gap between rich and poor. Let's also not forget all of the American industry that has closed so that people can buy junk at a lower cost. With anything goes Darwinist capitalism running loose this was all inevitalble. The multi-nationals do not have ethics, like liquid running to the lowest spot they will also go to where the labour is the cheapest, easiest to abuse, and where the environmental laws are most lax. I think something should be done to regulate trade. Also, hefty fines should be placed on industry within the west that pollutes. We are going to have to concentrate on public transportation. Something can and has to be done. Like open-surgery it will be painful but necessary. I don't buy that we just have to let the market run its course. Economic growth does not go very far on a dead planet.

Besides which, I'm old enough to remember the 1970's when all the smart people believed that we were entering a new ice age. I'll wait before being convinced on this one. I was mostly with you 'til this one. While I'm not old enough to remember it, my understanding is that the 70's new ice age stories were short-lived in the scientific community. A few research papers were published, a few journalists thought they could sell some papers with it, and a bunch of hyperventilating hippies who'd never seen a scientific journal and wouldn't understand it if they did echoed it for a few years. Meanwhile the scientific community investigated further and concluded it was not in fact terribly likely. Anthropogenic global warming has stood up to far more scientific analysis than that which collapsed the global cooling theory. Its not certain, but it is clear that at the very least we're conducting a massive experiment with our planet, possibly paving the way for interesting times indeed. I'm with those who think we should do whatever we can individually. I also think thats not going to be nearly enough, so we should be demanding that far more of our tax dollars go to funding research into alternate energy sources and subsidies for technologies that are young but ready to go. Finally, if we in the west do figure out how to maintain economic growth using less + alternate fuels, then we should share (at a reasonable cost) the crucial technologies and expertise with the rest of the world. As many have noted, we can't ask them to remain materially impoverished for the good of everybody, so we'll have to help them help themselves (probably building yet another road to perdition...).

paagle The 70's ice age predictions were pretty weak and scattered, but that doesn't mean that "consensus" is valid in science. The consensus has been wrong frequently in just the last century. In just my lifetime the consensus was used to scare the hell out of school kids. (The population explosion). Consensus should be a meaningless concept in science. Consensus is opinion, not data. Samuelson's article references the latest IPCC report. It says that sea level rise could be as high as 43 cm over the next century. But their 2001 report said it could be as high as 86 cm. Their 1995 report said 95 cm. These are their worst-case scenarios. A 43 cm rise in sea level over a century would hardly be catastrophic, yet most people's exposure to the concept consists of Al Gore showing pictures of Manhattan under water. The politicians and movie stars are controlling this debate. Those who don't sign on are called "deniers" knowing fully that that term has Nazi implications. It is a disgrace. It is not science. We know that we are in a 20,000 year global warming trend. We have accurate surface and atmospheric data for 200 of those years. We know that surface temperatures have increased about 0.6 C in the last century. We are very unclear on what the natural variability of surfaces temperatures have been over most of those 20,000 years. But the "consensus" says that we know what the climate will do over the next century. We also know that many many factors affect climate. There is solar output, orbital variations, cosmic rays (which affect atmospheric particles), urbanization (heat-island effect), mass irrigation (increasing water vapor), etc. If we are strictly talking greenhouse gases, then let's also discuss methane. Natural wetlands produce more methane than all of the livestock on earth. These contributers are rarely discussed by the "consensus" unless they are to be summarily dismissed. It's all carbon, carbon, carbon. That's the consensus, and that's fine. But consensus isn't science.

So the Chinese will be giving up their cycles for cars -- will the flipside by the Americans giving up their cars for bikes?
The ironies abound.

China and India are building their economies in exactly the same way we did. It's hardly fair for us to tell them they have to stop. You're right. Perhaps it will be possible for them to learn from some of the mistakes we made, however.
To draw a ridiculous analogy, We're like the older brother who got too drunk too fast when we started drinking. We weren't mature enough to do so responsibly, and we hurt the whole family in the process. Hopefully, we're learning how to enjoy the pleasures of imbibing without being drunken sots about it. India and China can learn from watching us grow up. They, too, wish to imbibe, but hopefully, they've seen the damage a dionysian orgy of industry can do, and will take steps to develop in moderation. I fear that the siren call of profit coupled with the tendency of industrialists to be decidedly amoral (in general)will make it difficult for thoughtful members of their governments to keep them from rushing into the same cesspool we almost drowned in. Let's hope their up to the challenge.
I wish them, and all of us, much luck.

Todd You are correct that rapid climate change can be catastrophic. The Little Ice Age caused devastation across Europe for centuries. The Dust Bowl here in the U.S. was devastating in its own right. But your ice age comparison points out part of the problem with this debate. We still don't know what causes ice ages. We have theories that point to atmospheric composition, orbital cycles, vulcanism (geology) and solar output. But we just don't know yet. And yet we are saying that we can predict climate with some accuracy over the next hundred years. And we are saying that we know carbon is responsible for these rapid changes. And so we push so-called solutions that will massively increase energy costs, which in turn will likely kill people. All of these predictions are based on computer models of a massively complex system. We do not understand all of the inputs of that system. That means the models are at best speculative. At worst they are worthless. Before we run off condemning a large portion of the world to poverty and death, maybe we should make sure we know what the hell we are talking about. The sheer arrogance of the big climate change advocates is breathtaking.

It doesn't seem to be happening with energy, but I have repeatedly read how many developing countries are skipping straight over wide-spread roll-out of landline telephones and going straight to cellular (a technology I can't abide, but never mind). Why shouldn't they do the same with electricity? And why aren't we all going nuclear?

Rich, I think the answer to the ice age question is all of the above. And you are right that we don't know the exact tipping point. Is it 5% more carbon? 50%? If we knew, I'm not sure it would be all that good a thing. I can see Halliburton playing chicken with climate change, trying to squeeze every last drop of petrochemical profit is can muster up to the limit. What I think we can do with regard to carbon in the atmosphere is gradually and gently tilt emissions away from the danger zone. Long term, what we're looking for is some kind of climatic stasis, keeping things as close to a happy medium as we can. After all, we know that carbon dioxide levels two centuries ago gave us at least 200 years of a safety margin, right? Then let's aim away from the sign that reads "Bridge Out Ahead." Nobody serious is saying let's slam on the brakes this instant. But do we really want to be motoring along at 60mph when we come into that blind pass ahead?

Todd I think there are serious people who are implying that we slam on the brakes, so to speak. Some of the proposals being made are radical and are treated flippantly. Take corn-based ethanol. It will take enormous amounts of corn to produce enough ethanol to make even a minor impact, and we would have to massively subsidize it. That will distort world corn markets, probably wiping out lots of farmers. It will require retooling major industry, building lots of new farmland infrastructure, huge subsidies for production facilities, deforestation for new acreage, droppin water tables from irrigation, etc. And what you would end up with is a much more expensive and much less efficient energy source and lots of wrecked lives in the wake of this little experiment. Oil is a miracle. Besides nuclear power, there is no currently usable energy source that offers anything close to the bang-for-the-buck of oil. Nobody in the climate change debate ever seems to realize the importance of cheap energy. Cheap energy means people in the developing world don't have to stick with subsistance farming. Cheap energy means access to food without growing it themselves. It means they have running water, and transportation, and electricity. It means the poor in developed nations can have more opportunities too. If we treat this as an engineering problem we'll be fine. We can engineer ways to make fossil fuel emissions cleaner with current technology, and they'll get cheaper over time. We can engineer more efficient vehicles. We can build a LOT more nuclear power. Geothermal power is improving too. Ground based solar is improving, though it will probably be mostly used for niche applications for many more years. We can also build carbon sinks (i.e. greening urban areas and reforestation). We can improve sea walls and coastal structures. Just continuing on our current path will lead to marked improvements. But if we do something stupid like giant ethanol subsidies, then we will hurt a lot of people. We will justify it by pointing to complex computer models and our miraculous ability to predict the future. But we will be doing it to show what good people we are and make ourselves feel better. And it won't make the slightest difference in warming.

We had a programme on tv in recent days where russian academics and heads of research institutes gathered to discuss global warming. They shouted at each other and argued about different things but all agreed that our planet is generally in phase of getting slowly colder, it got apr. 0.7 degrees C warmer for the last century, but that is not global process, it can be depicted as graph going slowly down but with local maximums (which can last for decades or centures), which depend on sun activity and very little depend on man's activity.
I read somwhere that in middle ages Black sea became frozen so that people could pass it by feet, in 20th century it is unbelievable to hear, as it is in subtropics we have summer resorts there. But last year it was about -20C frost at southern shore of Crimea, and a lot of my favourite cypresses died, there stand whole alleys of dead 100-200 years old cypresses :( Also in Moscow we had +1+5 in January 2005, in january 2006 we had frost that beated all records in history of weather observations -35C and in moscow regions even lower. This year January we again had about +5, like in Paris. And that scientists said what is really a serious problem is pollution of environment. Perhaps they are right.
P.s. I m sorry my joke about the man who led diaper-wearing austranaut astray was not understood. I bet he was teasing poor woman :( Spreading charm on purpose ;) *Masha

We're being criticized for buying a smaller house with no air conditioning. Plus, we're skipping the Prius and going straight to the scooter. It gets about a 100 miles to the gallon. I'd totally bike more if the roads around here weren't total SUV-ruled deathtraps. There *are* things we can do to slow down this industrial machine, but too many people don't believe that their individual actions make any difference.
We don't need to find a new energy source as much as we need to change the way we live and change how we define economic sucess.

Kit A massive government program to change energy sources, particularly to biofuels, can have a detrimental impact on millions of lives. If our goal is to address carbon, then there are lots of things we can do that don't involve distorting global agricultural markets and displacing millions.

I can afford to accept the inevitability of global warming--I live in the Midwest, so my house is unlikely to be underwater during my lifetime. In fact, the weather around here may even improve. My husband and I have already decided not to retire to Florida, but to stay here and wait for Florida's weather to come to us. But writing off the worries of people who live in Kiribati and other Pacific Island nations that are already losing territory to rising sea levels, and of residents of sub-Saharan Africa whose homelands may not be sub-Saharan for much longer, is something else again. For the sake of those people (the millions of potential "climate refugees" envisioned by some scientists) we need to formulate some responses, and to fund them. Because if we don't, we may find them knocking at our door fairly soon.

Yes but apparently it's only appropriate on a space shuttle.

Marian There's not a shread of evidence that any action we take in energy sources will make a significant difference in sea level changes over the next century. Even the supporters of Kyoto-style plans readily admit that. The best thing we can do for those Pacific Islanders is help them build seawalls.

paagle Good post and good points all around. However, the theory could be sound and you could also have highly politicized scientists at the same time. Look at the public discourse. The latest IPCC report came out a week or so ago. There was lots of breathless huffing about impending catastrophe by scientists. I even heard one interviewed in one report who said we were a decade away from a tipping point that would destroy us. (Anyone remember the Ted Danson ads in the 80's saying within 10 years the oceans would die?). But if you read the actual IPCC summary report, it's really not so scary. It's all well within what we can manage with current technology. You wouldn't know that by the scientists interviewed on TV though.

Kit A carbon tax seems pretty innocuous to me. I certainly never said the economy will crash. In essense what I said was that expensive energy hurts poor people, especially those in marginal economies. The good thing about a carbon tax is that you can make adjustments and offer incentives if it does cause any economic problems, such as rebates for poor people or higher rates on industrial and luxury carbon-use. A carbon tax doesn't touch developing countries who need cheap energy - another plus. And a carbon tax is certainly preferable to massive ethanol subsidies. I'm for consumption taxes in general. But back to your question. What is the cost of doing nothing? Would you mind quantifying that? Over a century it may be much less than you think. Once again, you should read the IPCC summary. It is written by various U.N, government, NGO, and business representatives and is as pointed and scary as possible. They represent the worst case view. Read it. See what they say about sea level rise. See what they say about Atlantic circulation. (Here's a hint - there's no ice age hiding around the corner). They do agree with Al Gore that Manhattan could end up underwater - if, that is, surface temperatures rise by 4.6 C and stay there for 1000 years. Funny how he left that part out on Oprah. They do note some bad potential problems, but it's not the end of the world. That's not what you hear in the media (or even here). It's all ice ages, super droughts, and drownings. Don't believe me, read it for yourself. http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf If you really want to help people most harmed by climate change, then spend a lot of money developing better batteries and desalinization. If you really want to lower atmospheric carbon, then spend lots of money on reforestation and developing carbon capture for vehicles. If you want to help Pacific Islanders, spend it on sea walls and better coastal structures. Use the carbon tax to pay for all these things. Subsidize solar and wind while we're at it. (A couple hundred new nuclear plants would make a huge difference too).

Yes, it's cheaper to prevent a problem than to clean it up, but most people aren't willing to believe there is a problem out there in need of prevention until it hits them over the head and needs cleaning up. The span of time between "too early to worry about it" and "too late to do anything about it" is often measured in split-seconds.