Excerpt from my book ms:
Now let me briefly borrow a direct analogy to our climate reasoning. People often believe that the gun problem can be fixed by limiting gun sales. The gun problem, however, is not proportional to this year’s gun sales so much as the number of guns readily available to a person who becomes angry or suicidal or is harassed by classmates (mental disorders are only a fraction of the setups).
It seems obvious that reducing the stockpile (there are more guns than people in the US) would be a good course of action to pursue. Would not a gun buyback program be the first thing to try?
But it is not obvious because people seem to have an inborn blindness in the form of a tendency to mix up an accumulation with the inflow rate that created it.
Who would have guessed? Yet there are many examples, and our climate reasoning is one of them. We suppose that, simply by stopping the annual additions from emissions, something is being done about the accumulation of legacy carbon dioxide that promotes the global overheating.
Wait, you may say. Emissions reduction has worked for similar problems such as limiting visible air pollution. We were just applying that principle to invisible pollution rates.
Indeed. But input is often confused with net input, inflow minus outflow. Nature cleans up visible air pollution with the next good rain—and so reducing the rate of visible emissions actually does reduce the maximum air concentration of irritants between rains. Ask people to estimate the time it takes to clean up visible air pollution, then ask about the cleanup time for the invisible carbon dioxide excess. They will guess about the same for each. It is a good reason to never use analogies to visible air pollution.
Unfortunately, even with zero annual emissions, we now know that nature’s cleanup of the 50 percent excess of carbon dioxide will take more than a thousand years.
It was obvious in 1996 that we will have to do the cleanup ourselves, though it was 2018 before the big climate reports got around to emphasizing it, likely because “speculation” about means was officially discouraged.
