Were,
And that's the rub isn't it? The steps to mitigate against climate change have immediate negative effects on people living today. They cause more starvation and more poverty, right here and right now. This point is not even in dispute. For me, the amount of suffering that AGW proponents are asking civilization to suffer in the present is far too great based on the less than convincing premise that AGW may prove catastrophic at some point in time LONG LONG LONG after I am dead.
I would think civilization would be more worried about nuclear proliferation than global warming.... and yet we aren't spending trillions of dollars to prevent it. I would peg the chances of a nuclear attack somewhere in the world in the next 100 years as close to 100 percent, it just seems inevitable. After some rogue state or organization detonates a nuclear device, AGW as a fear mongering device will become instant history. Then we will understand the difference between REAL threat and perceived threat.
PS. You make good points regarding ocean acidification, that is something I honestly know nothing about. I hadn't heard that argument before you brought it up.
Both concerns are valid, and complicated by serious attempts to gain power (the U.N.) and wealth ("developing" nations.) Both are counter-productive. Both will merely spread misery. If I had my druthers, we'd attack this problem on five fronts:
1. Improving energy efficiency in developed nations, principally the USA. We lag far behind most nations in energy efficiency simply because we've never made our energy artificially expensive and being both highly technical and with rich, unexploited natural resources, our energy has been unusually cheap. Where energy efficiency can be attained cheaply or at parity, we need to adopt it now. Where energy efficiency cannot be attained at a reasonable cost, we need research to bring the cost down or develop alternative methods.
2. Intense research into clean energy, principally solar and nuclear. Ultimately we'll need breeders and then fusion, but adopting the safer Canadian nuclear technology or thorium reactors would go a long way toward reducing our fossil fuel use. Given the highly destructive, widespread environmental disaster possible with nuclear, safety needs to be our first concern.
3. Intense research into capturing thermal radiative energy as we can SWIR and visible light energy. Waste heat is both resource intensive and environmentally damaging to remove, so being able to economically capture and use this waste heat would be doubly useful. I think this is the killer app of the twenty-first century.
4. Intense research into capturing atmospheric carbon. Carbon is incredibly useful, and if we can learn to trap and utilize CO2 for the carbon (and hopefully the oxygen, of which we also use a great deal) we can utilize carbon for reinforcing fibers, nanotubes, buckyballs, graphite, etc.
5. Providing clean energy like solar to the developing world to forestall them developing a fossil fuel society. Or more practically, to limit it; fossil fuels are simply too useful to avoid completely. Some like India have the industrial base to produce their own, in which case I'd prefer to see US aid in the form of paying the royalties rather than simply giving India money. Others could be given American-made devices. We still have a lot of work to do boosting efficiency and affordability, but honestly the biggest problems are overcoming these nations' desire to have cash and preventing production from being based on political favor rather than on merit.
All of these are at least dual use; even providing clean energy to the developing world gives us cleaner air, and anything that improves energy efficiency provides significant improvements in productivity. Progress is driven by cheap energy, period, but energy can also be made cheaper by using less of it. These are all useful advances even if global warming proves to be nothing more than a poorly understood long natural climate cycle. Right now we're concentrating on "carbon offsets", which reward rich resource owners in poor nations and ironically make those nations' poor less valuable to the rich people in their own countries. Why invest in a factory if you can make just as much money planting (or just not cutting) trees on your land? I'm all for preserving the rain forests, but not structured so that we end up making the common man around them even more poor. Ironically we saw the same thing in medieval England after the Black Death so raised labor rates. Many land owners, unable to afford the new higher costs of labor, shifted land use to raising sheep which is much less labor intensive. Thus a lot of peasants and serfs were kicked off the land they farmed and impoverished even though as a class they prospered. If we aren't careful we'll do the same in America by making energy so expensive that our remaining production flees to third world nations.
We're also handing out foreign aid to be distributed top-down, which seldom works. Africa has grown deeper into poverty even though the Sahara is greening, although admittedly AIDS has had much more of a role than has our aid structure. What we need is bottom-up aid that will allow people in the villages to be more productive, so that their excess production can be used to lift them up. If we can do this in a way that's clean and sustainable, we'll be better off regardless of whether CAGW has any basis in reality.
I will say one thing in support of climate research though. If we could gain the knowledge to predict global weather patterns a few years out, it would have vast payback in crop selection alone. Likely be a dry year? Try this drought resistant strain of wheat. We are not at all close to that point - and it might not even be technically possible - but it's certainly a long term goal.
Regarding your point about nuclear weapons, I'll be vastly surprised if there is not a nuclear attack within my lifetime, which will be considerably less than half a hundred years. Too many failing nations are armed with them; too many terrorist groups want them.
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