great site on "how to talk to climate change deniers"

[GIGObuster]

@Sam_Stone

There’s already a good example of this: Ethanol subsidies. The green movement championed ethanol for years as a ‘green fuel’, despite reams of scientific evidence suggesting that it would do very little, and in fact could have negative consequences for the environment.

But then the big agribusinesses realized they had a gold mine, and started heavily lobbying for it. The greens forgot their antipathy to big business, welcoming the ally. And so, hundreds of millions of dollars per year were allocated to to ethanol subsidies, making Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto and others very, very happy.

Well, now we have solid evidence that the result has been very bad. Redirection of food crops into ethanol crops drove up food prices for poor people. The deficit is growing faster. Ethanol looks like it is actually a net energy sink. And yet, the subsidies remain.

And what’s worse, once subsidies are in place they are very hard to eliminate, because the market adapts. The markets in the old foodstuffs shifted elsewhere. The mix of equipment and land use today is quite different than it was before. So now if you cut the subsidies, these companies may not be able to recover that easily. It becomes yet another perpetual entitlement.

Let me tell you a story about the National Wool and Mohair Subsidy:

The Wool and Mohair subsidy was put in place to help make military uniforms. Because they were made of wool, wool was declared a strategic asset, and in 1955 the National Wool Act created the wool and mohair subsidy.

Five years later, synthetics replaced wool in uniforms, and the military removed wool from its list of strategic goods. But did the subsidy end? Not on your life. It continued until 1993, consuming about 60 million dollars a year in taxpayer money, until a series of critical articles about it created enough heat for politicians that it was eliminated. But not really - the subsidies were snuck back in the door in subsequent farm bills, no doubt under pressure from the goat industry that didn’t know what to do with all its goats once the gravy train ended.

If you can’t get rid of a Wool and Mohair subsidy when no one needs wool and mohair, you can’t get rid of much.

As another example environmental foolishness, my own province of Alberta is spending 2 billion dollars to build a carbon capture coal plant - a gesture meant to fend off the environmentalists attacking us for our tar sand development. We’re spending this money despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence that carbon capture is unworkable and highly energy inefficient, and so expensive that it probably won’t even be able to compete with wind and solar.

And now the Democrats want cap and trade, despite plenty of evidence that such a program will damage the economy and will do almost nothing for global CO2 consumption. And what’s worse, if it results in energy-intensive manufacturing relocating to China or India, where their factories are much less energy efficient, it could actually result in an increase in global CO2 output. No one’s really sure, because you can’t predict how the market will react when you push it around by fiat. But these concerns aren’t stopping the democrats. They’re charging ahead with the plan.

I’ve been repeating this like a broken record on this board - opponents of cap and trade and other big-government intrusions need to stop debating the basic science of climate change, because that is actually where the greens have their strongest arguments. They WANT to keep the fight there. Because once you get past the basic science and start looking at the economics and practical limitation and long-term predictions and all the rest of the creaky scaffolding of the climate change movement’s plans, it all comes apart.

I’m already on record on not agreeing with Ethanol.

@Sam_Stone

Basically, they’re saying “The science is settled. CO2 causes climate change. We’re putting CO2 in the air, and therefore we’re changing the climate. That means ANYTHING we prescribe to stop this is right and good, and anyone who opposes our plans is a ‘denier’”

That item is not true as I can tell.

@Sam_Stone

There is a HUGE excluded middle there, and that’s where the devil lives. Don’t let anyone skip past that. The burden of proof is on the planners to prove how their plan will work, exactly what it will cost, exactly how much it will save in climate change-related damage, and why it’s superior to the various alternatives.

Forget the basic science. Next time you run into a supporter of cap and trade, just ask them this:

1. How much will it cost over the next 100 years?
2. How much warming will it prevent?
3. How much damage will be averted by that reduction in warming?
4. How long will it take?
5. Why wouldn’t raising the cost of energy in America just shift high-energy manufacturing elsewhere, instead of reducing it?

Don’t accept answers like, “You have to start somewhere”, or “yes, it’s flawed, but once it’s in place we can fix it”, or “We need to set an example for the world.” Those arguments are all common.

The last one in particular is completely nuts - the only example you set for other countries by increasing your own cost of production is that they can benefit greatly by NOT doing the same thing. You’ve increased their comparative advantage in energy, given them increased incentive to NOT go along.

Since the left has moved past the science and is now focused on implementation, the opposition has to move its arguments there.

There is indeed very little going for “You have to start somewhere”, or “yes, it’s flawed, but once it’s in place we can fix it” And I do agree with that.

But Bush the father showed with CFCs that that was not the case with “We need to set an example for the world.”

[Lumpy]

@GIGObuster

I’m already on record on not agreeing with Ethanol.

That item is not true as I can tell.

There is indeed very little going for “You have to start somewhere”, or “yes, it’s flawed, but once it’s in place we can fix it” And I do agree with that.

But Bush the father showed with CFCs that that was not the case with “We need to set an example for the world.”

Banning CFCs was about one-ten thousandth as difficult as limiting CO2 emissions. CFCs were used for a handful of applications (most widely refrigeration and air conditioning), and there were adequate substitutes for only slightly more cost. By contrast, industrial civilization is built on emitting CO2. Imagine trying to build a world in which for environmental reasons paper is banned. Or steel. Or wheat. Or anything that emitted detectable radio waves. Eliminating fossil-fuel emitted CO2 will be at least that hard- possibly harder. And as I’ve said upthread, I do think that has to be our eventual goal. But not at any price.

[GIGObuster]

@Lumpy

Banning CFCs was about one-ten thousandth as difficult as limiting CO2 emissions. CFCs were used for a handful of applications (most widely refrigeration and air conditioning), and there were adequate substitutes for only slightly more cost. By contrast, industrial civilization is built on emitting CO2. Imagine trying to build a world in which for environmental reasons paper is banned. Or steel. Or wheat. Or anything that emitted detectable radio waves. Eliminating fossil-fuel emitted CO2 will be at least that hard- possibly harder. And as I’ve said upthread, I do think that has to be our eventual goal. But not at any price.

Well, yes. But my main point is that the same denialist think tanks that told us that we could never influence the world or industry to change then are also telling us today the same thing.

And so far I do not see that scientists are demanding that controlling co2 should be made at any price.

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/10/is_350_the_right_target_for_at.php

There isn’t anything like a universal scientific consensus on whether 350 or something higher, around 450, make more sense as a global target. One of the problems is that “safe” is a tricky term to define. Just how much risk are we willing to live with? Everyone has different estimates of just what the probability is that we can hold global average temperatures to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels for a given concentration of CO2.

Terms like “Herculean” are typically attached to the goal of keeping CO2 levels below 450 before we have gotten off the business-the-usual train. Reducing them from today’s 387 to 350 seems like a fantasy, no?

Not to activists like Bill McKibben, who was behind yesterday’s global 350 Action Day, in which lots of concerned citizens arranged themselves in those three numerals for the benefit of aerial cameras. His logic, as relayed to the New York Times Andy Revkin goes like this:

"Three-fifty is the number that says wartime footing, let's see how fast we can possibly move, and let's hope against hope that it's fast enough."

But it isn’t just passionate activists who believe that 350 is doable. There’s Tufts University economist Frank Ackerman, for one. At Yale’s 360 magazine he argues that most economics studies of the cost of climate change mitigation show it’s entirely within the real of practicality to cut emissions of fossil fuels dramatically without causing another global financial meltdown.

At first glance, there is a bewildering range of estimates of the costs of climate protection. Look more closely, however, and there are just a few projections of economic disaster, out in right field by themselves. Other estimates range from modest costs to small net economic gains.

The outliers are the handful of private consultant studies funded by partisan lobbying groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.

...

These projections of economic ruin have not been reproduced by any major academic or non-profit research group. Many economic models find that the modest steps called for in recent U.S. proposals would have very small costs and virtually undetectable effects on total employment

And of four studies that looked specifically at getting emissions down enough to manage a reduction to the magic number:

One group starts from the (realistic) assumption of high unemployment, and finds that long-run employment and economic growth would be increased by a program of public investment in green technology and emissions reduction that leads to 350 ppm. The other three groups adopt the common assumption that short-run unemployment can be ignored in long-run models. They generally find that the needed emissions reductions will cost an average of 1 to 3 percent of world economic output, for some years to come.

There are some other challenges associated with focusing exclusively on 350 ppm. For one thing, just as important as the target is the speed with which we get there. We can only afford to pour so much more carbon into the biosphere (see the trillionth tonne thing), so we can’t afford to wait very long to stop cutting emissions. The longer we wait, the steeper the slope of the graph that charts the reductions necessary to keep the cumulative carbon emissions below the critical value.

It may very well be that 350 is the best long-term target. But no one, or at least, no one worth blogging about, is demanding we bring down emissions to 350 ppm directly from current levels. It is widely recognized that our best efforts will probably see CO2 levels top 400 ppm before they can begin falling. Short-term targets are at least as important. And it can be argued that a simple “350-or-bust” message (which I just made up) could do more harm if it doesn’t acknowledge that there’s no easy way to get there within a century. Even Hansen says he isn’t expecting action on a shorter schedule.

And if we need a short-term CO2 target, we need short-term emissions reductions goals. Ambitious ones, too, on the order of 40% cuts by 2020 in the developed world. Sounds like a lot, but the alternative is to give up or pretend that the world’s climatologists are wrong.