The Oil Drum

Actually, I live in Germany, very comfortably above sea level (though I did grow up near enough the Tidal Basin in Washington DC), but the point remains valid - climate change is unavoidable, regardless of cause, and it is how we deal with it that remains the essential focus in places like London, Hamburg, Venice, Miami, New York City, and most other places on a coast - which tends to cover a good slice of humanity, regardless of how you look at it.

I remain very agnostic on causes - though the amount of CO2 we have injected into the atmosphere on a planetary scale is hopefully beyond any meaningful debate, even if its effects are still unclear in the sense that this is something beyond current experience and research has only begun to understand the scope of complexity, and not understand the complexity itself (yes, I have talked about the Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age here too, and it got quite a reaction then) - but results are important.

Much of the argument about climate change is silly - whether London or the Netherlands, the people living there are dealing with the future, even if their understanding of it is imperfect. To put it a bit differently - I am pretty sure they would rather be 100mm wrong in terms of having built too high than the reverse.

And the hurricanes here (well, the German definition - they fit on the scale in terms of windspeed, but obviously lack true hurricane/typhoon features) which seem to be happening more often do not make the planners in the 1980s look stupid because they were ignorant of the precise mechanisms of climate change, it makes them look like very reasonable people who deserve to be in charge of making such decisions into the future.

To be honest, it is merely human to hold a position in the face of reality - Greenpeace did that here with Brent Spar, refusing to let it be sunk - when in fact, a realistic and beneficial process would have been cleaning it to essentially bare metal, then sinking it to be a fertile habitat, as has been practiced in other areas over decades - but since Greenpeace based its policy on opposing the sinking, there was no way to allow any realistic and cost effective alternatives to be considered, which was pretty moronic.

On the other hand, the obsolete North Sea oil platforms were sort of an out of sight, out of pocket exercise - the oil companies had hoped to sink many of them without any stringent supervision at all, so sometimes, realizing that perfection is impossible may be the best possible course.

What Greenpeace (who in the case of Brent Spar, lied about toxic sludge) was able to tap into was the fact that anyone throwing any trash into the North Sea - no coke cans from your fishing boat - is subject to fines. When you have pretty well trashed an area, you can either write it off, or at least try to stop making things worse - Europeans, for all their smugness and faults, don't honestly believe that there is another North Sea waiting in the wings to be used after the first has been ruined. Europeans seem to have a grasp on the fact that the world is finite, maybe because their age of empire seems to be firmly in their past. And they are very, very worried about how the weather has been for the last period of time, since it is beyond human/historical experience.

But to say nothing will change, or to simply assume that current understanding is adequate, is taking a risk that other people are not willing to accept - the Dutch will be happy if their pessimistic projections are wrong, but it is very unlikely they will have thought the money spent on such protection to have somehow been 'wasted' - like Europeans and vacation time, money is not the only measure that all humans value, even if North Americans seem blind to this.

As a guess, in another 5 or 10 years, sinking oil platforms, after cleaning them, will become a standard practice in the North Sea, and everyone involved will likely have forgotten about the Brent Spar fiasco.

Maybe in 50 years, people then will find these debates silly - but I will bet that those who prepared for less rosy futures are likely to be in better shape than those who did nothing. And currently, the feedback loops are running in the wrong way - sea ice with high albedo being replaced with open water, or methane releases in Artic regions (Antartica next perhaps, from currently unknown sources, much like seabed methane hydrates were unknown before deep water exploration became possible?), or water underneath glaciers accelerating melt - the natural reaction for caution seems abundantly justified, if imperfect. I have been hearing about the need for more research for at least two decades - the loudest have been those people interested in blocking any research which doesn't fit their preconceptions.

NASA seems to have just published some interesting numbers about January temperatures, but maybe after that Bush appointed 'editor' is in place, we can go back to ignoring the world around us, as such distorting information will no longer pass muster - besides, the U.S. has more important things to do than merely try to understand the world it lives in.