

Global warming: Moral vs Economic solutions - raphar
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/the-superfreakonomics-global-warming-fact-quiz/

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btilly
They are right that there are cheaper ways to cool the planet. However I
believe that they are seriously misjudging the costs of excess CO2. For
instance they barely mentioned that excess CO2 results in ocean acidification.
How important is that? Well for a start we're threatening the survival of
every animal that depends on calcium carbonate shells (think corals and
shellfish), and then threatening the rest of the ecosystem within which they
live.

Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool us down (and create more
acid rain) helps our temperature, but doesn't help with the next pollution
disaster. Or the one after that.

Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems
perfectly justifiable to me.

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incomethax
_Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems
perfectly justifiable to me._

Morally, or economically?

A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even
worse) than the one we're in now.

During the past year the world gdp _rose_ 3.1% (See
[https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/geos/xx.html)) - which was about 2% lower growth rate on gdp.

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camccann
_A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even
worse) than the one we're in now._

And a catastrophic failure of the ocean's ecosystem would have no economic
impact at all, I guess? An economic analysis can't just ignore the risks of
inaction when considering the costs of proposed solutions.

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sfnhltb
SO2 injection is just such a bad idea it is scary there are still people
talking about it. The problem is even if you ignore the nasty side effects, as
CO2 carries on rising you have to inject more and more SO2 every year to
counter the increased CO2 (especially combined with SO2's much lower residence
time in the atmosphere being in the range of a few days/weeks instead of CO2
being measured in centuries).

It would also tie us in - if SO2 stopped being injected into the atmosphere
for any reason, all the CO2 is still there and as the SO2 washes out of the
atmosphere within a few weeks, the CO2 warming would come back full force
immediately - the longer SO2 had been used to offset CO2, the worse it would
be.

Offsetting CO2 warming with a seperate cooling effect is risky, the real
solutions are either reduction of CO2 output - and even that might not be
enough for many countries/cities because of the decades of delays in any
meaningful action that have been engineered since we knew what was happening -
or some technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

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mitko
_Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly
cool the Earth._

Yes, this approach will cool it! But what will happen next? The Earth is a
very complex system and its behavior might be impossible to predict with
certainty. The more we mess with it and pretend to be all-knowing gods the
worse it will get.

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ams6110
Agreed. The complexity of the Earth's climate can't be reduced to a handful of
TRUE/FALSE questions. Anything we do to attempt to manupulate it will either
a) have no significant effect or b) have unpleasant, unforseen side-effects.

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SamAtt
I agree with the analysis. The only thing I'd add (that they don't mention) is
that the Earth's temperature will fluctuate wildly on it's own regardless of
our CO2 output. We know this. The Earth dropped into an Ice Age and then got
hot enough to thaw that ice age out all before we were even here. So the issue
really has to do with finding ways to manipulate the Earth's temperature both
ways, not just cool it down.

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swolchok
The Ice Age and thawing were on a geological time scale. Global warming caused
by human pollution, not so much.

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aceofspades19
How do we know that human pollution has caused global warming entirely ?

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xiaoma
The Copenhagen Consensus deals pretty much entirely with this question:

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html)

