I don’t really know anything about Jim Manzi. But on this particular blog the level of discourse was pretty high and the latest post was fewer than four hours old. Plus I had just attended the Gordon Research Conference on Industrial Ecology (about which I can tell you nothing or I’d have to kill you– well, let’s say, “sequester” you). So I felt both qualified and compelled to respond.

I used my real name and linked to my blog, so I decided I had better go ahead and own up.

Here are my comments, which stand alone pretty well:

A lack of understanding of an incredibly complex system (in this case, we’re talking about the whole and entire actual world) is not a legitimate argument against prudent action. In fact, it is precisely the opposite— an urgent call to action. You talk about “what a reasonable and informed person would believe to be a legitimate danger;” I counter, while you may be reasonable, you are not informed. Like it or not, climate change is not a social issue. The welfare of the world’s poor does not enter into the question. It is a physical issue, and the tools we use to understand the physical world are scientific tools.

The modern economy depends on ultraspecialization of knowledge, and the vast array of intelligent people critically studying climate have converged on what is essentially an unassailable consensus. Media-savvy crackpots notwithstanding, the people who have dedicated their lives to understanding biogeochemistry don’t have a doubt in their minds. CO2 emissions now exceed the IPCC’s 2001 worst-case scenario; ocean pH is measurably falling; and entire ecosystems depend on the integrity of coral reefs. These are not projections, they are facts.

We are effecting change on a massive scale and CANNOT predict its effect. The only responsible answer is to change our behavior. To pretend to hem and haw over the “economic costs” of changing our behavior is asinine. It adds hubris to irresponsibility. Moreover, to sugarcoat rationalizations about doing nothing with talk of the world’s poor (which don’t figure into any economic calculation by any fossil fuel user in the developed world) is as disingenuous as it is self-serving. It’s worth mentioning that SOx emissions were cut at a fraction of the projected costs; and anyway economic models are far more uncertain than physical models. So why let the economic models call the shots?

In a free world, the only way to effect change while preserving liberty is with economic force. This is a market problem with a market solution: a price on carbon. Why is that so hard to understand?

In retrospect, I don’t think I particularly raised the tone of the debate. Rather, I’m kind of shrill and whiny. The conclusion, which can be paraphrased as “why are you so stupid?” is clearly obnoxious. It’s also deliberately simplistic, as I reject economic arguments, which goes directly against some very good advice delivered at the above-mentioned conference. I do use complex sentence structures, though, which is true to form. I should probably have sat on the post for an hour or so and re-read it. But now it’s done.

Eh. Welcome to real life.

NEW YORK — Bank stocks shot higher Friday after an agreement on a financial regulation bill reassured investors that new rules won’t devastate financial companies’ profits.

Banks outdistanced the rest of the market after congressional negotiators agreed on a bill that increases the regulation of financial companies, but that doesn’t include some of the harshest provisions that the government originally proposed. The legislation imposes new rules on the complex investments known as derivates, but the rules aren’t as strict as investors feared. It also includes a far milder version of what’s been called the Volcker rule. That rule, named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, would have banned commercial banks from trading simply to increase their profits, a practice known as proprietary trading.

Analysts said the deal removes a huge cloud that has hovered over the financial industry for much of this year. Investors have feared that intense regulation would devastate bank profits. Now, the market seems to believe that financial companies would do well even with the new limits on their business.

“They come out of this big-time winners,” Bob Froehlich, senior managing director at Hartford Financial Services, said of financial companies. “Two years later, people will look back and say ‘My gosh, nothing really changed.’”

This can be corroborated with CO2 measurements from around the world and is really not contested.

However, some people seem to still believe that this change could not be caused by human activity.  Here I present a simple, back-of-the-envelope computation to measure the total weight of CO2 in the atmosphere, compared to the total weight of CO2 released by burning fossil fuels.

First, the easy part: the weight of CO2 in the atmosphere.  This page has a nice description of how to quickly estimate the weight of the air we breathe.  Basically, atmospheric pressure at sea level is a direct measurement of the weight of atmospheric air.  Multiply it by the surface area of the globe and you’ve got your answer (in Newtons).

The partial pressure goes with the mole fraction, so CO2 specifically accounts for 320 parts per million of that (in 1970) or 380 parts per million (in 2010).

for a net gain of about kg CO2 (also known as 300 billion tons).

Where could all of that carbon have come from?

(images link to source) These numbers have been converted to “tons of oil equivalent” for energy purposes, which is convenient for us because a ton of oil, when burned, releases a pretty reliable amount of carbon dioxide.  Coal is an inferior fuel: since its heat of combustion is much lower you have to burn almost twice as much to get the same amount of energy, which means you release twice as much carbon.  Since this chart is showing energy-equivalence and not CO2-equivalence, we can assume that it is a significant under-estimate for coal (slight over-estimate for natural gas).  But rather than tease that out, we’ll assume we had gotten all of the energy from oil.

Taking a quick-and-dirty average, I’m going to go ahead and say we’ve burned an average of 3000 million tons of oil, 2000 million oil-equivalent-tons of coal, and 1400 million oil-equivalent-tons of natural gas per year since 1970.  I’ll even be generous to the denialists and call them short tons, and round down, to get about 5,500 million metric tons of oil or kg.  Burning a barrel of oil (about 140 kg) releases about 430 kg of CO2 – that’s roughly 3.08 kg CO2/kg oil.  Let’s round down and call it 3.  Same as pi.

So we’re talking about kg of CO2, directly from anthropogenic sources, per year for the last 40 years.  This is just from burning fossil fuels, not from land use change (deforestation and development).  That’s over 600 billion tons in 40 years, more than twice the observed increase.  The difference between what we spew out and what sticks around in the atmosphere is, of course, getting soaked into the oceans, among other sinks, where it is converted to carbonic acid, lowering the pH of the sea with detrimental effects on sea life.

We clearly don’t fully understand the biogeochemical dynamics of carbon circulation, but it is abundantly clear that anthropogenic emissions are far more than sufficient to account for observed changes.  Face it: we are messing with the atmosphere on a grand scale.

Every now and then (and today, at 12:40 PM I still haven’t headed in to work yet) I like to pass an hour of time by going to the New York Times opinion page and clicking on everything with a remotely interesting headline.  Lately this habit has become more fun because of schadenfreude–

Well, really, it’s not schadenfreude– I was unemployed myself just months ago– as it is a sort of Vonnegut-like glee at catastrophe.  The whole world seems to be going to hell, and you see it in the unemployment numbers as well as the torturous debate about new media, which is really a debate about the future of knowledge.  What inspired me to post today (and here begins the eponymous spouting off) is the symmetry among the various themes of culture, economy, and ecology, the latter vis-a-vis the weak but still transformational climate change bill which, weakened as it is, will never make it past the (appallingly timid) US senate.

Of course, climate change is an issue which is dear to my heart as well as my profession.  Activists and researchers alike have had to come to terms with two crucial facts: first, global change is occurring and will have unpredictable (and potentially cataclysmic) effects regardless of any mitigation efforts we could conceivably enact.  Now, of course, there cannot be any such thing as scientific proof that cataclysm will occur, only that cataclysm has occurred, at which point it will be too late.  Second, many people, including possibly a majority of Americans, either do not understand or are not significantly concerned about the possibility of global change.  In a democratic society, the twentieth-ranked issue is ever unaddressed.

What does this have to do with new media and old economies?  Well, superficially, the similarities are not insignificant.. we see a continued outcry of opinion and concern..people see that shit is going down.. and yet nothing is changing.  In the copyright debate people are arguing for an extension of copyright privileges to prohibit linking; in economics, the watered-down stimulus has “failed,” and even with taxpayers on the hook for $12T, Wall Street bonuses “may reach 2007 levels”; and cap-and-trade legislation has somehow to be constructed in a way that it will not raise consmer prices.  Raising consumer prices is the whole point of cap and trade– to provide economic incentives to spur new investment and changes in behavior.  This is Econ 101.  And I haven’t even mentioned health care or the state of public education.

And so the months roll past and the bloviators argue.  Nothing changes.  And nothing will change.  Except newspapers will, one by one, go bankrupt.  Knowledge will become more contingent, less researched, more opinion, less fact.  The ocean will continue to acidify, having possibly “detrimental” effects on the ecosystems that provide the basis for the marine food chain.  Maybe that won’t affect fish stocks.  It’s hard to imagine, honestly, that that wouldn’t affect fish stocks.  And as the ranks of the effective unemployed crawl towards 20% of the US population, just as health care costs continue to escalate and education once again becomes a stepping stone for the privileged few towards greater privilege, simultaneously the revenues that fund public agencies dry up and services vanish.. In California, the state with nearly a 2/3 majority of liberal democrats in the Assembly, the government stopped paying people with cash today and we’re careering toward a libertarian wet dream.  Private everything!

By the way, property values in Santa Barbara have not dropped and I am still spending 60% of my take-home on rent.  Plus it’s not entirely clear whether I’m going to get an 8% pay cut (or even if the state will start paying me with an IOU).

So sitting back and watching (and occasionally spouting off) is really all I can do to maintain my sanity.

In other news, I’ve had “Thriller” stuck in my head for four days and my humming is threatening Abbie’s sanity.