Dealing With Climate Change

Dealing With Climate Change

If there is anything history does tell us about the world's climate, it is that it is a highly dynamic thing that will change. Society's debate is not really about if the climate is changing, but rather about 1) how fast it is changing 2) how much its change will impact us and 3) how much of its change we have caused. Sure, there are plenty of "climate change deniers" out there, but if you really pay attention to them, what they really attack is the idea of anthropomorphic climate change. Most of them neither confirm nor deny that other types of climate change might be happening. Nor are their opponents blameless. Those who talk most vociferously about climate change will immediately become deniers if you attempt to provide any evidence that there is any non-human cause for it to do so. Both sides tend to have a laser focus on human influences.

I am not going to deny that humanity has impacted the climate. The idea that the industrial era with the massive amounts of coal burning that blackened cities and blighted health for decades would have no impact is ludicrous. I will however challenge that we are, could possibly be, solely responsible for it. And since most people arguing for climate change's reality deny the possibility of any other cause, I will question their integrity, and thus the reliability of their assertions.

But note I said there are three real questions. A few people out there seem to realize that. I end to post quotes from them. There are real questions about how much and how fast the climate is changing (which are really the same question, since "how much only makes sense in terms of a fixed "how long," and a changed "how fast" and "how long" will produce any given amount you care to solve for). I also tend to think, as I said above, we are ignoring other possible causes of the change we do/have see/seen, and that these alternatives should be better explored and in some cases are more persuasive than the idea of anthropomorphic change. This is particularly true since other possible causes tend to have fixed and/or cyclical impact, versus the runaway disaster scenarios that the anthropomorphic crowd fixate on.

Still, if the climate changes noticeably at all, some areas of the world will (statistically speaking) probably benefit, and others will suffer. What will the balance of cost and benefit be? Both in terms of the wonder and beauty of the world we live in, and in more pragmatic terms in its ability to support and sustain us? If we are impacted, even if we somehow caused none of it, we still have to figure out how to deal with it. Similarly, even if we cause very little of it, we should still be responsible in our use of the world and its resources, and not wasteful or careless. The industrial age is excusable only to the extent that we, as a society, were truly ignorant of both our impact on our world and on ways to avoid having that impact without unacceptable cost.

So many people seem to treat humanity as a disease. I refuse to do so. The world is for us, it is not ours, but it is ours to manage and yes use. And so a "solution" to climate change that basically boils down to "we should not care about our standard of living, lets just do whatever it takes to preserve the world as if, without us, it would never change" is unacceptable. The headline on an article I read about the ways that housing can be adapted to help the United States meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement is an example of this. The sub headline reads "Smaller housing, denser neighborhoods, and heat pumps are key."1

Now I have no problem with the latter part of that. If heat pumps will help us meet our international agreements in ways that gas or oil heat will not, fine. We can try to incentivize people to move to heat pumps. More efficient heating should also be less expensive heating, so it should be a societal win all the way around. If it is not less expensive, well, there are ways we as a society can offset that if we, as a society, judge the goal sufficiently important.

It is the first part of that sub headline that troubles me. The editor (or whoever came up with the headline) is revealing an anti-human bias. Sure, the tendency towards over-sized houses is rather ridiculous, but the benefits of less dense housing on a family's standard of living is equally hard to deny. I have heard lots of single people talk about the joys of city life. Most parents talk about the desire for a yard or other open spaces for their kids to play in. Everyone wants the lower crime rates that tend to come with less dense housing. And while having a family of three in a six bedroom house, or even a four bedroom house where each room is the size of some entire apartments is excessive, some families do in fact need those five and six bedroom homes. Cities might be ideal for small families or busy singles; suburbs and small towns allow for a variety of differently sized homes for differently sized families (I have heard from more than one co-worker that it is difficult to find housing for your larger families in reasonable distances from Amazon's Seattle headquarters).

The article itself is not nearly so problematic. It talks about retrofitting houses to be more energy efficient. This is a onetime cost that will bring long term savings for both heating and cooling. Again, if we want to prioritize these kinds of goals as society, we could find ways to help families meet these one time challenges. It talks about different ways of heating houses (see above), and while it talks about multi-family versus single family housing, and housing size, the article, unlike the headline, makes no real recommendations, it is presenting the facts as discovered by the researchers.

Some things are all about the science. Policy decisions however, need to also include your best guess on the societal impact. Sociology might one day be a science, but only when we are willing to treat natural law as normative, and not as optional. Until then, sociology is essentially an opinion on which premises we should pay attention to.