[li]A great many contributing factors are excluded from Climate study models because scientists have no way or predicting them (i.e. the oceans cuurents, jet streams, etc.)[/li][/quote]
“More recently, elaborate models of the ocean currents have been added to the climate models. The transient scenarios mostly use these more elaborate “coupled ocean-atmosphere” models. Instead of simply calculating how the climate and oceans would respond to a doubling of CO2, these models use the historic and projected changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases and calculate how the climate might change each year until some date in the remote future. Many of these model calculations include the cooling effects of sulfate aerosols.”
[quote]
[li]Increased solar flare activity over the past several years may be the main culprit behind the current warming trend. I’ve seen Mars’ warming climate cited as an example. [/li][/quote]
Most climate researchers minimize the effect of this. I wonder about your sources.
[quote]
[li]No one can accurately estimate mankind’s impact the Earth’s environment. I’ve read termites and volcanos pump out overwhelmingly more greenhouse gases than we as a people with all our machines could ever muster.[/li][/quote]
What matters is equilibrium. Emissions versus sequestering. Even if humans emit only 1% of total C02 emissions per year (I don’t remember the actual figure) , if this is 1% more than can be sequestered it throws the system into disequilibrium. Greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.
Possibly, but this has to be balanced with the loss of vegetation (such as tropical rainforests) due to human activity.
Gotta start somewhere. Wealthier countries have more financial and technological resources to respond to this problem in the short term. In the longer term one would hope new, cleaner technologies will emerge, and these will be shared with developing countries.
Hydro power is relatively clean. Wind power is almost competitive. And remember the nuclear industry is highly subsidized – I wouldn’t call it a model of cost-effectiveness.
Good point. Does anyone know if the cost of the proposed nuclear byproducts dump in Nevada is being paid for by those who created the waste? Or is it coming out of the general tax base?
One of the ways we have fooled ourselves as to the cost of fuel is via the oil depletion allowance. I.e. petroleum producers deduct the depletion of their reserves from profit in computing their income tax. This allows gasoline to be cheaper than it would be if the whole cost of exploration for new reserves had to be paid for at the pump.
As the economists would say, the cost of developing new oil sources was “externalized.” Which is to say, it was paid for by a method other than in the cost of the product. Adam Smith wouldn’t have approved of that, I think.
Dear oh dear, another rule of the Straight Dope is that we actually read posts before talking out of our arse about them.
Some small points for you:
I didn’t claim that ozone depletion was not due to man, so getting your knickers in a twist about such a claim is way off the mark.
Ozone depletion is not what is causing global warming.
As regards “reading up” on the subject, you might care to do a little yourself, and not from one-sided reports such as that issued by the IPCC. Try the National Center for Public Policy Research (here), in particular their comments on global warming.
The facts are somewhat different to how you present them.
[ul][li]Average global temps, according to ground based instruments (which are thought to give an inaccurate picture) have risen by only 0.3 - 0.6 degrees in the last century. According to NASA measurements, temps are not currently increasing AT ALL. Neither of these figures tally with the 2.5 - 10 degree rise predicted by climate change models. Sources: 1, 2.[/li][li]No matter how much we claim that climate change models are “the best we can do”, the fact remains that actual data still shows that the models are hopelessly inaccurate. It has already been pointed out that the models are far to simplistic, and ignore huge contributing factors. Compare actual temp changes with those predicted by models here, or see how NASA point out that even general predictions are meaningless in the real world since the real climate doesn’t follow smooth trends but tends to change abruptly regularly in this report.[/li][li]Far from melting and flooding the entire world, it appears that the Antarctic ice sheets are in fact thickening. Source: 3.[/ul]I don’t intend to continue digging out facts and figures 'coz it would take all day. However, I think I have made the important point clear: that contrary to what you seem to believe, there is NO consensus as to what is actually happening to the climate; some scientists claim the Earth is warming up, some say it is cooling down, some say it is roughly staying the same. When it is unclear what is going on, how can you possibly trust predictions as to what is going to happen in the future?[/li]
Furthermore, no matter what the change is, how the hell can you be sure that it is us who are to blame? Mars is currently undergoing global warming too, though no doubt you blame that on our power stations too.
A few comments for Ace_face whilst I’m rolling:
This is based on a misunderstanding of dynamic systems. The entire eco-system equilibrium cannot suddenly be thrown out of kilter by a change in one of the variables; the equilbrium will reassert itself naturally. For instance, increased cO2 levels do result in more vegetation, especially green algae levels in the oceans, which act as a sink for these higher emissions. An increase even as high as 1% in carbon emissions does not automatically result in a gradual build-up of this “extra” CO2.
Hydro power is clean, but not an option for most of the world.
Wind power is not competitive - wind farms suffer from the fact that there are no economies of scale to be made from larger wind farms. In addition, increasing the proportion of national power being drawn from wind farms has the big downside of increasing instability in supply.
This is a perfectly fair way of doing things - a company’s oil reserves are a depreciating asset, and so need to be removed from the balance sheet over time, just as in any other business.
Being fair to the owners of business isn’t the only test. One result of a tax break for depreciation is that our national transportation system has been distorted, in my opinion, by fuel that is cheaper that it otherwise would be.
We have a one person/vehicle mode of transport in most cities in the US. The major transportation system (automobiles) of cities, like Los Angeles say, are jammed during rush hours to the point were people often spend 10 hours to work 8 , the other two being used in getting there and back. While the individual is at work the auto just sits there taking up space in parking lots or garages, with the owner paying quite a hefty sum for the space. Only recently have cities started systems for the mass movement of people and most of those require subsidies.
Huge amounts of freight travel cross-country by truck, the ton-mile cost of which is higher than is that of a railroad train.
Long distance passenger travel is pretty much restricted to air. Even for distances as short as 150 miles, jet aircraft, whose best operating altitude is above 20000 ft., are often used. For such short distances nearly the whole flight consists of a climb followed almost immediately by descent.
One result of this system of transportation is that our use of energy/output unit is quite a bit higher that most other industrial nations. There was an article several years ago in Scientific American comparing our kwh energy use for a given industrial output unit with that of other nations. I can’t find it at the moment, but I’ll keep looking. In any case, ours was highest by a substantial margin.
And last, but not least, is that our one person-one auto and the use of trucks for long distance freight has reduced our domestic oil reserves to the point where we are highly dependent on a continued flow of that commodity from regions of the world that are not particularly friendly to us.
David, I agree with what you are saying about the fuel useage in the US, but I don’t agree that this is because the “tax break” is distorting the market. Taking account of depreciation is a basic accounting principle used in all industries, not a tax fiddle. Companies are allowed to reduce the values of their assets on the balance sheet because these assets really are reducing in value.
You may as well say that allowing companies to deduct costs from revenues is just a way to reduce the amount of tax owed, thus making goods cheaper than they ought to be.
Why are you responding to things I didn’t even talk about? Are you responding to another poster? I haven’t said a word about ozone depletion in this whole thread.
NCPPR is a conservative think tank and is a prime example of those spreading junk science. By contrast, the IPCC is an impartial group composed of scientists to review and summarize the work of their peers that has appeared in refereed journals. The only bias that IPCC represents is the bias of peer-reviewed science over “science” by sound-bite and press release. And, the NAS study was commissioned by Bush himself for God’s sake and I know of noone that has tried to claim it to be biased. The National Academy of Sciences is not an advocacy group of any sort and stakes its reputation on presenting sound science.
Noone argues that there are not some uncertainties and that there are certain aspects of the science that need to be understood better. However, if you are going to argue that a few selected “facts” (some of them likely not even referring to peer-reviewed science) from right wing think tanks should be given equal weight to impartial reviews of the peer-reviewed literature by scientists in the field, you are being ridiculous!
The increase that has occurred in atmospheric CO2 levels and it’s attribution to humans is a part of the science that is so settled that even most (if not all) of the flagrant deniers aren’t arguing about it.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by sirjamesp *
[list][li]Average global temps, according to ground based instruments (which are thought to give an inaccurate picture) have risen by only 0.3 - 0.6 degrees in the last century. According to NASA measurements, temps are not currently increasing AT ALL. Neither of these figures tally with the 2.5 - 10 degree rise predicted by climate change models. Sources: 1, 2.[/li][/quote]
Let’s see how what fallacies we’ve committed here:
(1) We’ve compared temperatures in degrees C to temperatures in degrees F without converting.
(2) We’ve compared the predictions of climate change models over the next century to what has happened so far…two very different things. In fact, scientists have been testing the ability of the climate models to “predict” what has happened thus far as a way to test the models. While the models are not perfect, they are doing an increasingly admirable job at agreeing with the experimental data.
By the way, the general gist of your first (BBC) link summarizing the facts on global warming does not agree with the general gist of your comments whatsoever.
Yes, I know it is, but should it be? The point is that the assets are used up to the benefit of the company and its customers. All tax payers should not have to pay for the replenishment of them. Only those who benefit from the use of it should.
This, I think, is straight out of Adam Smith’s analysis of who should pay the cost of infrastructure. He advocated toll roads, toll bridges etc., etc. so that those who use such things would pay for them in proportion to their use of them. This was his suggested method of making sure that the true cost of an item was reflected in the market price.
Just call me numbnuts. You are right, I seem to have attributed to you something that you did not say.
Junk science? Facts are facts - just because they do not support the doom and gloom claims of environmentalists does not make these facts any less relevant than the ones trooped out by the IPCC.
This would be grand if the conclusions of the IPCC report was unanimously agreed on by its contributors - which of course it wasn’t. If the IPCC contributors aren’t sure what is happening, how can the final conclusion be concrete?
And for my final sneer towards the IPCC - the group is not, as you seem to believe, a group of independant scientists. It is a group of government appointed bureaucrats. Several of the scientists who contributed to the report objected to how the commitee had put “spin” on to their findings, and one lead author (Dr John Christy, in case you are interested) claimed that the “worst case scenarios” about which the report squeals so loudly were added at a late stage of the process at the request of a few governments, once the bulk of the scientists had no further input.
Some uncertainties?! Flippin’ 'eck, the whole idea of CO2 being responsible for global warming is based on a correlation between recent small increases in CO2 and recent changes (increases? decreases? who knows?) in global temperatures. We have yet to hear of a sure-fire mechanism by which this might even take place to such a significant effect with the tiny amounts of CO2 in the atomsphere (0.03% by volume). High concentrations of carbon dioxide can be shown to trap heat compared to low concentrations - but at the levels we are talking?
Not only have we yet to see an experiment showing this process at such low levels of CO2, it has even been suggested that we have the cause-and-effect the wrong way round: it is possible that increased levels of CO2 are the RESULT of global warming, not the cause. Over the long period of time since the Ice Age, increases in CO2 seem to have followed increases in temperature (try googling with words such as “high time resolution”, “ice cores”, “temperature” and the important “edu”).
So not only do we not know which way the Earth’s temperature is moving, we don’t even know whether CO2 levels have any effect on this.
Important Read for anyone interested in the other side of the global warming story:
If you want some peer-reviewed science, here are the names of 18,000 scientists who disagree with popular opinion: The Oregon Petition. Read why they come to this conclusion here. You will notice that, once again, rather than “junk science” as you call it, the conclusions of this project are based on the unbiased facts presented within the report. I’d be interested to see which factors you think have been fudged.
Yes, assets are used up, which is why they must be removed from the balance sheet some how!
A company buys an asset worth $100 ( in this case, a tiny oil reserve). It sells this reserve for $200 over a period of time. Of course the company must deduct the value of the original asset from any profit it makes!
But the taxpayers don’t pay - the company just pays tax on the profit it makes from selling its asset, and no more.
But the use of infrastructure isn’t comparable to aquiring a commodity.
The cost of building a bridge can be funded up-front by taxes, so that is free at the point of use (thus sharing the burden across all taxpayers), or, as you say, the cost can be recooped through tolls (thus only affecting the actual users - though I would say that this makes usage unfaily proportionally more expensive for poorer users).
Of course they have to be removed. So remove them. It doesn’t follow that they must therefore be deducted from profits. The loss of the deduction would have to be made up for by higher prices with the extra cost to the customer going into a reserve to replace the asset when it was used up. Thus, by Smith’s idea, those who benefit of the use of the asset, pay the cost of the asset.
Sure they do. Given that government needs a certain amount for its operations, tax that isn’t collected from the company because of the depreciation deduction has to be collected from all taxpayers in the form of higher rates.
Yes it does. And that is a weakness of Smith’s plan. Some way would have to be found to allow poor uses of facilities to pay the toll in order to get to work, get goods to market, etc. I’m only just now rereading Wealth of Nations so I don’t know how, if at all, Smith deals with this.
I’m at work and don’t have time to respond to you in full detail, but I just wanted to make a few points.
What distinguishes junk science is not that it isn’t based on fact but that it makes use of facts very selectively (and also distorts them) in order to push a specific position. There is a huge body of science out there and if I grab a small subset of it that seems to support my viewpoint then I can probably convince anyone except an expert in the specific field that my viewpoint is correct.
Look, you can’t get a group of scientists to agree unanimously to anything. Consensus does not mean unanimity. Hell, there are a fair number of PhD biologists out there who believe in “creation science” rather than evolution. Does that put evolution in doubt? [By the way, does anyone but me notice the extreme similarities in tactics and such between creation science types and those who challenge the science of global warming? I’ll admit that they are not completely parallel in that global climate change is a pretty new field and the uncertainties in the science are still considerably greater, but the general gist of how the attacks on the science are launched is extremely similar.]
As for the IPCC process, it is not a group of government appointed bureaucrats; it is a bunch of independent scientists who have volunteered to devote a considerable amount of their time to the process. Yes, I am sure there are some support staff and the reports do get reviewed by some political types from various countries, but the scientists review the science and write the reports. (And, it seems to me that the input of the political types is more likely to push things the other way since many of these countries, like the oil producing ones, have strong vested interests in the current fossil fuel economy.)
A few people have tried to make claims about the process being distorted but these claims have not stuck and, in fact, the NAS report addresses this issue particularly and concludes that the IPCC report accurately reflects the science. [Yes, they do have a few constructive criticisms of the IPCC process but they think it is basically sound and agree with its conclusions.]
Well, I am happy that you have such confidence in your intuition that because CO2 is a small component of the atmosphere that it can’t possibly make a difference. However, intuition alone is not science particularly when you have no expertise as far as I know from where this intuition might be derived. [For example, I hope you wouldn’t argue that plutonium dispersed throughout the atmosphere at, say, a level 1/1000 of this would have insignificant effects on our health.] Other things like aerosols and particulates are probably even found in lower percentages and yet their effects on heat trapping or the reverse are understood to be significant. By the way, I believe the number for the level that CO2 has increased above the baseline of before the industrial revolution is about 30%, so as a fractional amount of what is there it is a significant change.
Yes, I know there has been some argument about cause and effect. But I think that has been at least partly if not completely settled now.
Finally, the Oregon Petition has no relation to peer-reviewed science and has been debunked extensively. Peer review doesn’t mean you take a poll. (Hell, this isn’t even a scientific poll! You aren’t allowed to vote NO and you are bombarded with a one-sided view before you “vote”. This almost makes the old Soviet elections look good!) As you can see it is a petition that presents only one side of the global warming science out of context and then asks scientists to sign on to their point of view. Hell, as a PhD physicist, I am actually better qualified than most of the signers and yet I have not tried to convince you on this issue on the basis of my credentials for the very good reason that I don’t consider myself personally qualified to evaluate the science in detail. I do read some of the papers in Science and Nature on the subject, but eventually I have to rely heavily on qualified scientists in the field (especially through mechanisms like IPCC and NAS) to make these judgements. To do otherwise would be pretty arrogant.
By the way, even many of the companies who have a stake in the fossil fuels industry or closely related industries have now come on board in acknowledging the scientific evidence of global warming. For example, BP Amoco is one. (In fact, the only holdout I know of off the top of my head is Exxon Mobil.)
I should correct that statement to be “the only holdout among the major big-name oil companies”. [I.e., I didn’t mean it to be amongst the whole fossil fuels industry. Western Fuels Association, for example, is a major purveyer of junk science in the global warming debate.]
Much of the Limbaughesque criticism of global warming studies is based on the claim that human effects are so small they can’t possibly affect such a huge system as the global climate.
This totally ignores non-linearities and complex interconnections that can lead to positive feedback in which a teeny weenie little input results in catastrophic instability in the system.
True enough…although I don’t even think you have to invoke non-linear responses to understand why humans can have an effect. The human forcing is not in fact all that small. Here’s a graphic of the current carbon cycle: http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/13.htm. If I am reading this graphic correctly, the human input of carbon into the atmosphere each year is ~6.5 Gigatons per year, or on the order of 1% of the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. So, that means that if the rate of carbon passing out of the atmosphere remains unchanged and our emissions remain the same, then we will double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in ~100 years. In reality, I think the re-uptake of carbon from the atmosphere may increase somewhat too so that the doubling won’t occur so fast (at current emission rates!)…I haven’t read up on the details of this. But, the point is that our contributions to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere are not just a tiny amount.
Cite please? Especially to a link that debunks the Oregon petition’s science (you make a good point on the peer review, but I’d like to see some refutation of the Oregon Petition’s presentation specifically). Thanks.
Sure, but the Limbaugites don’t usually rely on actual statistics and computations of the atmosphere-vegetation CO[sub]2[/sub] exchange balance. Their claims more often rely on that old standby, “It stands to reason that …” Or even mocking statements like that of the OP, which treats Antarctic climate as if it was a place about the size of Catalina Island and not a continent as big as the United States.