Gus
> If sea levels rise
> anything next to the sea will be underwater.  The more they rise, the more
> things will be underwater.

Yes. There is one report which indicates that over 20% of the human
population lives right next to the sea. With the complete melting of the
Antarctic Ice (which may happen in just over 200 years) ocean levels will
rise by as much as 200 meters (over 600 feet). That would inundate most of
the homes where 20% of the population lives.

It is actually impossible to place a price or cost on this level of economic
loss. The one simple reason is that it is impossible to predict the size of
the population in 200 years, and secondly it is impossible to predict
migration and demographic trends.

The 'contrarian' approach fails to consider the most likely scenario.  What
the contrarian fails to do is do his or her *own cost benefit analysis*. As
with many other environmental hazards including nuclear power, coal
combustion, and so on, the contrarian does not consider renewable
alternative methods of producing the same thing (in this case electricity)
without major environmental damage and that these renewable energy sources
will reduce or vastly eliminate the catastrophic and incalculable cost of
doing nothing.


> I am ending my part of this discussion.  I feel like I am debating a
moving
> target who simply wants to argue for its own sake.  I don't, and so will
not
> reply to any further answer Steve offers.  He can have the last word
because
> I have other things I would much rather be doing.  I leave it to other
> readers to decide which of us has made the better case.
>
> Gus diZerega

The approach of the contrarian is to actually attempt to 'frustrate' his
'opponents' with an endless serving of economic 'red herrings'. In most
cases the contrarian is a person who is working directly for a 'polluter'
and is a person who is dead set against regulations pertaining to the
emissions of coal dust, vast amounts of CO2, air born mercury, cadmium,
sulfur, and arsenic leaching out of the heaps of millions of tons of coal
fly ash. The contrarian is a 'masochist' who argues that filth is clean,
that the stink you smell is the smell of money, that there are no suitable
alternatives to the combustion of coal, even though locomotives stopped
using coal a long time ago.

The central 'red herring' that is served up is the one of 'economic
efficiency'. The myth that the contrarian usually perpetrates is that the
only solution to environmental castastrophy associated with coal ash and
lethal heavy metals is 'economic efficient' methods of 'containment'. Of
course here on this list, they rely on some 'apologist' for the coal
industry who would rather 'give that money' away to poor nations instead of
actually spending some of this money on finding clean, renewable energy
sources, on energy efficiency, and replacement of dirty coal. Appeal to good
intention, and do nothing.

The problem with the masochistic contrarian is that pain is a positive
stimulus for them. The more 'inaction' on the matter, the more they have
this dual value response to everything potentially painful. Lomborg has
admitted that he is only doing what he is doing for 'money' so he cannot be
simply a contrarian with a masochistic desire for feeling pleasure through
pain.

The contrarian who believes in the 'myth of economic efficiency' will
undoubtably be left with feeling a lot of pain. One of the reasons for this
is that with coal combustion you have one of the cheapest sources of
electricity there is. You simply go out and dig and dig and dig until you
have a heap of coal big enough to generate steam in a turbine which in turn
runs a generator and all you do is distribute the power to who ever wants to
pay for it. Originally that was what was done, but then the trees started
dying off around the coal fired electrical plant. The first to complain
about this were the farmers down wind. Later it was foresters, and fishers,
and then it was well owners. For instance farmers in Washington and Idaho
downwind of the giant mills located in Trail BC complained about
acidification and the effect of acid deposition over 50 years ago. They went
to court and won. The giant Trail smelter then simply built a taller smoke
stack, and did some expensive alterations to reduce acid deposition.

This is what the coal industry is faced with everyday. A heap of ashes, a
large plume of icky stuff that has to piped out and released into the
atmosphere which affects the health of each and every organism which it
comes in contact with. For the average contrarian, all this is regarded as
the 'cost' or the 'price' of the high 'standard of living' which we all can
afford (not because we are smart, but just by matter of circumstances).

The coal industry is 'visibly the dirtiest, flithiest, and most centralized'
form of bureaucratic pollution there is; only a true masochist would love to
work for this industry and defend it from challenges, especially clean air,
clean water challenges, and conservation challenges. The 'true believer' in
the benefits of the visibly dirtiest, flithy industry on earth has to
'suspend all ethical judgement' in favour of money maximization for the few
owners of the filth generating industry.

As the world supply of gas and oil peaks in 2005, the demand for coal will
increase proportionally. The relative cost of using coal will drop in
comparison to hydro, nuclear, biomass and renewables (except for solar and
wind). However the coal that will be used will not be as clean as the coal
that has been used so far. The remaining supply of coal on earth is
estimated to last up to 1000 more years at current rates of combustion. Much
of the remaining supply of coal is vastly more dirty than the coal used in
the past. Even the most 'masochistic' contrarian knows that economies
flourish and prosper as long as there is enough cheap domestic source of
energy. The unfortunate thing is that if the combustion of coal doubles in
the next 20 years, there will be some major effects on global ecosystem
health which are not yet predicted by climate scientists. Many of the most
serious environmental effects associated with transboundary pollutants (eg
CFC's) were not predicted. None of the effects of the organochlorine
insecticides were predicted. None of the effects of tributyltins on molluscs
and immune systems of sea mammals were predicted prior to the shellfish
industry being wiped out in Japan, France, and many other industrial
countries where TBT was used to prevent boats from being encrusted with
barnacles, etc.

The main problem with the contrarian and climate science is simply that: it
is impossible to predict in all cases what is going happen. Yet it is those
substances and processes which are the most likely to cause harm, which are
also the most likely the ones which were not predicted to cause harm which
actually have caused potential castrophic harm.  However by not exercising
caution, the contrarian is actually failing to acknowledge predictions where
there is a reasonable probability of harm, catastrophic harm.

The contrarian is caught in a knot that cannot be untied. The contrarian
wants to have us believe that it is better to wait until there is some
economic efficient means for stopping transboundary pollution (GHG
emissions, ozone depleting chemicals) rather than find alternatives to
current means of generating cheap electricity. In order to do this they have
to rely on a set of misconceptions too. One is that of taking risk. They
want to argue that risk is a form of betting, or something like that. If
there is some means of reducing the reliance on coal, then it is scoffed at
as being itself an environmental problem. The ultimate argue grounds for
this argument is rathe simple and persuasive. Why save and hoard your
assests so your offspring can inherit them and spend without working for the
assests. They argue that the only ethical value in life therefore is
equivalent to 'dying broke' since there is no advantage in saving money for
others. Really. But this is vastly different in tone and in intention than
deliberately avoiding waste generation fo the sake of leaving the planet in
fine shape for the next users, which are future generations.

The only value that can be quantified therefore is money. So go out and
spend it all now since you will not have the health left in 40 years to
enjoy it. There is nothing wrong in taking this attitude, but for goodness
sake it does help to assist one's own children where there is more than
enough to live on.

The contrarian is caught  in this dual value response of comparing money to
all ethical value which can be felt in the universe, and that is 'painful'
since as Ben Franklin wrote: money talks, save it and don't talk, let your
money do the talking for you.

Anyway the argument reduces to a discussion of mere pennies, mere
trivialities in monetary standards when it comes to finding an immediate and
satisfactory solution to climate change and global warming. For the rest of
us, we are left to consider what to do. Build more renewable forms of
electric generation, build more mass public transit which is both cheaper
for the commuter and quicker for the user, reduce consumption at the
personal level, and have fewer children.

It seems self-evident to me that reliance on foreign energy sources is
extremely expensive for an economy. This is another 'headache' that will not
go away. For the economies which produce their own energy sources, rather
than have to purchase these, the future may much 'brighter'....

It always seems to me that one contrarian on this list that often expresses
his rage, or pain, is that even if they got their way with using up all the
coal on earth in 1000 years (an additional 300 times the CO2 would be added
into the atmosphere), they would still be complaining about some
environmentalist wanting to stop burning the last little drop before even
cock roaches and sow bugs were all killed off too.

Uncontrarily yours,

John Foster, MSc, Environmental Science and Management