http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum

Agreed to a point, Joe, but we will have to adapt our society and societal norms (e.g. rigorous conservation, closing the manufacturing loop) on our way toward mitigation.

IOW: we will have to rethink the way we do things, which is adapting our society to be more thrifty, less wasteful, etc.

Keep up the good work, sir.

Best,

D

Best,

D

[JR: The first sentence is absolutely true -- absent very robust mitigation efforts, adaptation is a meaningless term for what humanity will go through. The second sentence is really only true in an incidental sense. Some climate change is inevitable and hence some adaptation is inevitable. But again, if we were really really serious about mitigation, adaptation would be almost incidental.]

Many of the fossil fuel company executives, and many of the AGW-denying politicians, feel exactly that way about global warming.

There’s a question that is sometimes asked of people. If you knew the planet and everybody was going to die in 24 hours and you couldn’t do anything about stopping it, would you want to know?
A regular reader of this website and other global warming blogs would surely answer that question as yes.

It will probably be at least a decade or two before global warming causes severe problems for most Americans. It will be at least a century – probably more – before global warming kills the majority of its victims. The timescale of your hypothetical threat could not be more different from the timescale of global warming. Further – there are things that can be done to greatly reduce the severity of global warming (and in almost any conceivable AGW scenario, more CO2 emissions will always make things worse), and to adapt to what can’t be prevented. Finally – it is very unlikely that that AGW will kill everyone – even Lovelock considers that unlikely.

AGW differs so much from your hypothetical threat that an interest in AGW is unlikely to predict an interest in your threat.

But tipping points are weird things. Who would have predicted 2 months ago that we would have the weird world wide stock market and financial problems that we have had.

Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan . He predicted these problems at least as far back as 2003. (Although the book is mostly about other things.) He is not the only one, by far. And in 1999, when the laws that had kept investment banks separate from deposit banks, and the laws that had limited leverage, established after the 1929 market crash, were repealed, several liberal economics professors predicted there would be a housing bubble, a credit bubble, and, in about 10 years, they said, the collapse of many banks and lending agencies. That was a predicted disaster, but since respecting those predictions would have interfered with making tons of money, many influential people chose not to listen, chose to defame those who predicted a credit bubble, those who predicted worldwide financial problems, and so forth.

Some of the smartest and well informed people, Treasury Sec. and Federal Reserve chairman seemingly didn’t.

They stood to make a ton of money if the predictions of disaster were wrong. And when the predictions of the disaster turned out to be right, $700 billion was robbed and looted from taxpayers in order to bail them out.

In the long term the price will come down.

The future is going to be a very chaotic with a massive break down of civilly.

Hopefully, we can start formulating a survival strategy now that we have the luxury of relatively peace and a not so panic stricken global environment.

By golly, if you think the misery has not arrived have a look at Haiti, Cuba and the US Gulf coast, which I am willing to bet will be having disasters like this year every couple of years on average now!

Is there going to be any adaption by those in the Hurricane basin? Will New Orleans will be abandoned – yes!

A regular reader of this website and other global warming blogs would surely answer that question as yes.

Obama has been called a ‘Messiah,’ maybe he can do some good. Okay, maybe that was from detractors and political opponents of his.

But tipping points are weird things. Who would have predicted 2 months ago that we would have the weird world wide stock market and financial problems that we have had. Some of the smartest and well informed people, Treasury Sec. and Federal Reserve chairman seemingly didn’t. We’re doing stuff in finance that we never could have predicted would be happening.

Can the same thing happen with Global Warming acceptance and realization? Possibly not. But possibly yes. From my state, we may be electing a writer and preformer from Saturday Night Live, Al Franken, as our US senator (He’s a little ahead in an election of what was Paul Wellstone’s senate seat.) Maybe he can have some affect. The Democrats might have 57 senate seats, if not more. That might do some good.

But if there is a real change, it would require doing things better and differently than they are happening now. But change does happen all the time. Just getting discouraged won’t do any good.

they throw out some crumbs to the greens to get their votes, but there is no program beyond looking just a little greener than the other guy.

nothing is going to get done.