George Soros on Climate Change, China, Elections
This video of George Soros’s speech at the Munich security conference over the weekend may be of interest.
The talk was split into two parts. The first was devoted to talking about the risks climate change represents and what a potential solution might look like. The second part criticised world leaders in turn.
The Greenland ice sheet is estimated to contain 2.9 million cubic kilometres of water. Soros did a lot of talking about what it would mean for the global population if sea levels rose by 7 metres. There is a billion cubic meters in a cubic kilometre and, according to NASA, Greenland is losing 270 billion tons a year.
(2,900,000 * 1,000,000,000)/(270,000,000,000 *.907) Assuming the rate of melting is constant it would imply Greenland will lose all its ice in 9741 years. Therefore, one has to assume the rate of melting will exponentially increase over time. That’s obviously where the hurdle rate of limiting heating to 1.5 degrees in the Paris Agreement comes from.
The challenge is humans are hard wired to understand linear progression. Exponential growth curves are very difficult to get people to understand until they are close to peaking. That suggests support for measures to curtail warming will continue to compete with the real world issues of feeding, housing and providing an rising living standard for 8 billion people; many of whom live on the coast.
However, it is worth highlighting this chart does not imply an exponential trend. That’s also why legions of the world’s wealthiest individuals are happy to buy beachfront property.
Nevertheless, the World Economic Forum and Soros continue to talk about geoengineering as if there is no risk of unintended consequences. If the entire climate debate tells us anything it is that unintended consequences are difficult to predict ahead of time.
Carbon Credits appear to be on the cusp of breaking out of the yearlong range.