/sci/ - Science & Math

>>3516632

I'm not so sure about that last part. Global warming has the potential to be tremendously damaging, and much of the effects are irreversible for many human lifetimes. And while coal is cheap as fuck right now, the externalities (especially air pollution, smog, asthma, etc.) it imposes on society would make it more expensive than nuclear or wind with the same kind of cost analysis. This is without factoring in the effect coal has on global warming. To me it seems the sooner we get off coal, the better.

>>3302894

Protip: with policy actions, and can choose to REVERSE bad policies if we don't want them

Let's assume the supremely unlikely case that all the scientists really are wrong, and there is no global warming. Well great, we can cancel all those useless regulations and taxes and whatnot. We will probably appreciate it anyway because we're running up against peak oil, but whatever. Maybe peak oil was fake too. Nothing stops us from turning back on a bad decision.

What if we choose to ignore global warming, and it turns out global warming is real? We know from the paleoclimate record that whatever changes we make now to the Earth's atmosphere, those changes will persist for thousands of years. From our perspective, it is irreversible.

>>2937372

>"A hundred thousand years" is an exaggeration

Lol no it isn't

The rate at which excess CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere is limited by the rate at which rock weathering can absorb it. These are not very fast processes, otherwise we wouldn't have a problem with global warming to begin with.

http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2009.ann_rev_tail.pdf

http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2005/2004JC002625.shtml