Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiraz
, could you accept what seems to be the overwhelming advice of the experts and go to the next question - what do we do about it? It would be great to have a discussion of what we could do to maximise current benefits and minimise the downside to future generations - provided that political sound-bite thinking could be kept out of it.
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G'day there, Ray,
I keep trying
not to talk about the optimal response to global warming and to other environmental problems, but people keep moving the discussion in this direction.
Oh well, this seems to have morphed into an environmental policy forum!
And politics always comes into it; in every Australian environmental forum that I contribute to, the obligatory comment in
each and every post seems to be to criticize one particular side of politics!
(And such is the nature of environmental issues that one gets mercilessly attacked from all sides, no matter what one's opinion!)
(the following para. has been extensively edited)
In my opinion, the first question about Global Warming, insofar as figuring out
what to do, and
equally importantly when to do it, is to ask: "
How urgent is the Global Climate Change problem compared to the multitude of other environmental problems that exist?" This is a necessary first analysis, because there is a need to prioritize the
relative degree of urgency of fixing the many and various types of environmental degradation.
Why is it necessary to prioritize?
Firstly, because a lot of time and money and energy can be (and is) wasted by people on addressing problems which are of relatively low priority or which are not urgent, for instance, here are two examples of 'problems' on which environmentalists have expended vast reserves of money and committment on issues that I regard as
minor problems or non-problems : :
- well-funded campaigns against the so-called 'evil' of the genetic engineering of plants
- ongoing campaigns against the small amounts of residual agricultural chemicals that are found in our food. (which cause much fewer cancers than the food itself!)
Secondly, while a specific environmental remediation effort often assumes the passionate "feel good" emotion of a crusade and thereby acquires a certain nobility, it often
diverts limited resources from more important issues. One good example of this is when people will devote entire lifetimes to trying to save every last whale (and who can argue with saving such a cute animal.....), but, as a result of this effort, the much more important effort to preserve the krill & fish stocks (and the Marine Food Chain) suffers neglect in comparison to their favoured environmental cause. There are too many other examples of environmental 'crusades' that perhaps made a minor difference, but distracted attention from the most pressing environmental problems.
In other words: is global warming the first problem that needs to be addressed? Or are there other environmental problems that should be addressed before Global Climate Change? Ignoring for the moment the inherent difficulty and the enormous multi-disciplinary intellectual complexity of planetary management, the setting of priorities is a very difficult real-world problem, because human beings have available only finite reserves of time, physical and intellectual energy, and resources. This
lack of energy and time and resources is, in my opinion, particularly notable in respect of environmental issues, because most people prefer to get on with day-to-day activities that are much easier and less challenging than addressing the difficult and complex issue of the ongoing management of the biogeochemical systems on the surface of our planet.
To restate my position once again, there are a vast range of environmental problems, and a vast number of possible actions to remediate them, so the various courses of action need to be weighed up, and the various environmental problems need to be prioritized:
(1) How good is the data and the evidence for each identified environmental problem?
(2) Can the problem be quantified and/or understood in a structured manner, and can effective remedial action be identified?
(2) How reliable and accurate are the predictive models for the future behaviour of the environmental system we are trying to fix?
(3) Which environmental problems ought or ought not to be addressed first, and what is the level of urgency for a societal response to each specific problem? Which environmental problems
should not be addressed?
(4) What is the social and economic cost of action on a problem, compared to the social and economic cost of inaction?
(5) Is it even feasible to remediate a particular environmental problem, or do vested interests, and/or economic costs, imply that a particular problem is inherently intractable.
The following is a random list of examples where there are several alternative environmental issues or courses of action that need to be weighed up and prioritized. It is not possible to address every problem at once.
- Do I try to save the whales (which are "cute and cuddly and remarkably smart") or should I instead be trying to preserve the base of the food chain (e.g. krill and plankton and small fish) and the keystone species?
- Should I regard marine conservation as a lost cause, and instead address the conservation of terrestrial ecosystems instead?
- Should human population control be addressed before addressing some of the direct environmental concerns? A planet which will soon have 10-12 billion people will inevitably have a more degraded environment and will also suffer a greater degree of resource depletion. Indeed, in Africa there are countries which already have 80-150 million people, and their fertility rate is still so high that the total population of some of these countries could double in a matter of 30-40 years....thereby destroying an already degraded environment.
- Should the most urgent effort go into addressing deforestation and land degradation and the loss of soil fertility, or should the major current effort go into addressing longer-term concerns such as climate change?
- A tradeoff that I often strike in my own studies of environmental remediation and restoration ecology is: do we emphasize conservation reserves and national parks, or should we conclude that these will always be of insufficient area to save sufficient numbers of species, instead putting our major effort into restoring the vast areas of already partially-degraded landscapes into conservation-capable form?
- Are some problems, for the moment, impossible or too expensive or too time-consuming to solve? For instance, strenuous efforts to preserve meaningful amounts of native vegetation on the fringes of big cities have too often failed, despite a lot of effort by a lot of people. As another example, is money that is currently spent on 'renewable energy' wasted because of the current low capacity and high cost of wind & solar generation and the consequent small effect on CO2 mitigation, and therefore should the money instead be saved and spent later on when these technologies have developed further?
- Nuclear power vs. coal-fired energy generation? This is a particularly harsh conundrum, as both technologies have some adverse effects.
- Is bad governance the first problem that needs to be addressed? In other words, is environmental degradation actually a result of corrupt and unresponsive and poorly-advised governments together with an ill-educated human population? (for instance, I once wrote to a senior government advisor on energy policy, and he did not know some of the basic information that you would get from reading New Scientist and Scientific American for a decade!)
- Should we be equally concerned about the loss of each and every species due to habitat degradation, or should we look at trying to maintain the entire landscape in habitable form? (this gets into very difficult territory, such as the question "to what degree do we assign rights to animals?")
- Is resource depletion (e.g. fish stocks, fossil fuels, phosphates, limestone, economically useful minerals, etc.) a bigger problem than the other conservation problems?