Global Warming progressing far faster than previously thought

Great Debates
481

If you want to win over people who actually understand the issues, I’d suggest not using idiotic tripe like that as an argument.

Summarizing the point of the video: “We’ve invented things before. So we can get rid of fossil fuel and invent something else.”

He then makes the claim that we can get rid of fossil fuel for about 1% of GDP. But the video offers no cite for this. I’m heavily skeptical of such numbers, because the environmental movement has a habit of playing extremely fast and loose with their suppositions and claims.

Remember “green jobs?” Remember the ‘studies’ that showed you could transition to a ‘green’ economy, create jobs in the process, and actually improve the economy? It was a total crock made up out of whole cloth, but almost everyone on the left from the people on this board to the President of the United States adopted it as a mantra. The stimulus blew billions of dollars on ‘green jobs’. And what happened? Exactly what some of us of said would happen - it totally failed. Of course, at the time we were called liars and deniers for disagreeing about that, too.

So where does that 1% figure come from? As near as I can tell, the ‘analysis’ is based on a claim about economic performance under various carbon reduction schemes, and therefore offsets the up-front costs with supposed savings from the prevention of losses due to global warming. The analysis also seems to consider the cost purely on the basis of carbon taxes (i.e. the carbon tax might be 2% of GDP, and will save 1% of GDP in the long term, thus the total cost is only 1% of GDP).

If that’s the case, it’s a ridiculous claim. The cost of a tax is not necessarily just the tax - the tax can act as a catalyst that reduces economic output by much more than the cost of the tax. The assumption is also that the tax will be perfectly efficient in reducing carbon output, but in reality taxes are co-opted by rent-seekers, exemptions are given, tax avoidance takes place (i.e. heavy industry moving to China), etc.

In any event, trying to model economic performance of the global economy decades into the future like that is little more than snake oil. We have no capability for doing that. Just for fun, go see how accurate the CBO’s 10 year predictions of GDP have worked out historically.

Also, the video uses public sanitation as an example of a mass shift towards a cleaner technology that cost more money. But it’s a totally useless analogy. Public sanitation advanced quickly because it provided an immediate measurable effect on the quality of life of the people paying for it. People demanded it for immediate, tangible reasons that affected everyone. It’s more akin to the development of the motorcar in that respect. We spent a ton of money on new infrastructure then, too. But we did it because that’s what everyone wanted, and that they valued it enough to spend a significant fraction of their income on it.

Climate change policies are not like that at all. The money collected is not obviously spent on things that people want. The claims of damage are for decades in the future, but the demand for sacrifice is immediate. The demands for action include handing over a significant amount of political and economic power to people of suspicious motives and to organizations outside of democratic control. Not everyone who is being taxed will even benefit from carbon reductions. Some northern countries would actually benefit. Growing seasons would be longer in the grain belt. The people who are going to get hammered most are the ones with the least amount of political power.

That’s not a recipe for global action. Using the rise of public sanitation as an analogy completely misses the key factors in the debate. The biggest being the fact that oil is a fungible, global resource, and therefore unilateral reductions in consumption will simply drive down the price of oil and increase the comparative advantage of cheap energy, stimulating consumption elsewhere - possibly in places with lower energy efficiencies. Shifting heavy industry from the U.S. to China may not be in the environment’s best interest, y’know?

482

Sure, if you think a scientist like Richard Alley has not consulted other experts, it is not tripe.

But then this is tripe so there is no need to continue, it does not say that, Richard Alley and the group he is representing reports in their Earth the operator’s manual site that they are talking about using current and just made technology.

483

Don’t remember calling you a liar, I concentrated on the science part of it, however, the truth is that as usual I don’t think you lie, but your sources do.

To begin with, other countries in Europe demonstrate that the economy does not stop when dealing with the issue. Most of the criticism ignores that Republican stalling efforts are mostly to thank for the lack of progress in green jobs.

Nice racket from the Republicans, stop any efforts to control emissions with the system that included a way to increase those jobs and then tell others it was Obama’s fault. However, in spite of it, the growth seen tell us that progress is still going; as I pointed out, it would be better if it was not for the denier Republican party.

484

I don’t know enough about politics to say much about this sort of thing, but I have little doubt it’s an ugly brutal fight, always. To me, the Republicans are the party that would actually remove solar water heating from the white house roof, after the Democratic President had it installed.

That tells me a lot about the mind set of the two parties.

While politics can’t change the climate, it certainly can change the world.

485

Of course what some thug does in office has nothing to do with the actual physical world, it does influence the funding for science, the technology that will be promoted, the message to people, and all kinds of shit like that.

But it has nothing to do with the climate change that is happening. Nor will it speed up or slow down the changes.

Returning to the topic, there is something unusual happening right now with the north Atlantic .

People in England probably know this already.

It’s not global warming, but it’s certainly a change.

486

Well, now! Here’s at least one billionaire ready to spend big on the climate-change-action side!

487

Train wreck a comin

488

In this thread, or IRL?

489

It bugs me that such ignorance just stands, like nobody, not a single person reading known enough to slap that bullshit down.

http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter05/chapter05_09.htm

Now when you read some nobody telling you the information on the solar issue, from a college course, from an actual University, is wrong and they are right, you know you entered the twilight zone.

490

And other researchers disagree. Why are yours right and the others wrong?

491

I looked at that source before, it comes from 2005, it is missing a lot of recent research, what FX ignores is that I pointed out that the same text book group has other books that do recommencement that we check the IPCC for the latest information.*
*(The Third report, yeah outdated books, but the recommendation from the text books than has to be followed, or else we will get stuck in The Scary Door) :slight_smile:

492

Other college level educators do not. You and the other warmers seem to think the IPCC somehow “does science” and somehow overturned all knowledge of anything related to the sun.

That is foolish and wrong.

Your idiot blogs are also wrong.

493

… says the guy who has never AFAIK got anything right on the subject of climate science – ever! :smiley: I’m still chuckling over “water vapor is not a feedback” but I’m more impressed by this recent trifecta where you managed to get* three things wrong in a single post*. Actually, four things, if one counts the Mat Collins quotation from that exemplar of scientific authority, the Daily Mail, on which Collins himself had to correct them the next day.

Actually you got five things completely wrong now that I think of it – and that’s just in the past couple of days. Still want to play this game? OK, then the solar thing makes six.

Because my statement about the solar constant being essentially constant over recent decades (and really over the entire post-industrial era) is not in dispute by any serious science, and your problem once again is an incompetent armchair reading of a discussion of possible long-term centennial and millennial changes which, even over those timescales, are dwarfed by the magnitude of anthropogenic forcings, and are in any case highly speculative (the author’s own statement that “The correlations are somewhat controversial” is rather an understatement).

The magnitude of solar variability in the context that is relevant and the context that I was clearly referring to can be readily seen here – compared to GHG forcings, solar variability is almost invisible.

The latest IPCC AR5 cut TSI variability estimates by more than half from the AR4, and clearly states:

From IPCC AR5 WG1, Technical Summary, TS.3.5; more details in 5.2.1.2 Solar Forcing and 8.4.1 Solar Irradiance.

494

I think I hit a nerve. Sorry.

495

If you’re going to quote a perfectly ordinary statement of fact that no serious scientist disputes and refer to it as “ignorance” and “bullshit” and use as your evidence a misinterpretation of something you Googled on the Internet, then you can expect to be corrected on it. But yes, after five or six or seven times, it gets tiring.

496

So you’ve got no problem with billionaires attempting to swing elections with their fortunes - unless they’re the Koch Brothers?

497

Hahahaha. The current global temp has not been increasing. The current global temp has actually plateaued/paused. The IPCC, and it’s feeder organizations, are currently looking for a reason to explain why the Earth’s temperature refuses to follow the IPCC’s guesstimations.

It’s the fading credibility of the IPCC and the agw believers that is hurting the agw efforts.

498

Yeah, but even if there will be no horrific global warming, we still need stop stop polluting. Especially China. That damn soot from their coal power plants is melting the ice in the NH. It’s really bad.

499

The ‘lack of progress in green jobs’ is entirely due to the fact that such jobs can’t exist without continuous, ongoing subsidies. I’m not arguing that creating ‘green jobs’ is impossible. You can create any kind of job you want if you simply pay for it with taxed money. You can create 100,000 jobs for left-handed glass blowers tomorrow if you throw enough money at it.

Of course, what you never see is all the jobs that weren’t created elsewhere because the money to create them was taxed away to pay for ‘green’ jobs. That’s always the case with government ‘job creation’, and why it’s so compelling. The jobs created coming in visible lumps, benefiting visible constituents. The jobs lost due to the necessary taxes happen diffusely across the economy and are never seen. So then you get ‘unexplained’ results like the government ‘creating’ hundreds of thousands of jobs - while the unemployment rate increases.

The claim I’m talking about was that ‘green jobs’ were the future, and that American investment in ‘green’ industries would pay back more than you put in by making America the world leader in such products. I’m sure you remember the arguments - ‘green’ jobs can’t be outsourced, ‘green’ jobs are economically sensible because the savings in energy would more than make up for the subsidy, yada yada. Eleanor Clift used to write about that all time, as did many other liberal writers.

Of course, the whole ‘green economy’ thing was a clever campaign trotted out to combat the accusation that ‘green jobs’ and a transfer to alternate energy was expensive and would hurt the standard of living.

As for using Europe as an example of good ‘green’ policy, you might want to rethink that in light of the collapse of the Spanish solar industry when the subsidies became unaffordable, and the rising complaints in Germany about sky-high energy prices and the dismal returns of solar power as compared to the promises the government made.

According to the U.N., worldwide investment in alternative energy sources actually declined 12% in 2012. We’re not seeing the start of a ‘green economy’, we’re seeing an industry propped up by artificial subsidies slowly collapse as the subsidies go away. And the subsidies are going away in part because they simply aren’t delivering what they promised.

But by all means, continue blaming those evil Republicans. Of course, that doesn’t explain the results in other places in the world, but whatever. Any bogeyman will do.

500

Yes, yes, it’s all about blaming others. that way you don’t have to get off the couch and actually do anything.