I’ve heard it claimed that the Kyoto agreement, if adhered to to the letter, would cause a global economic depression as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s. This may be true or not, but the question remains: just what is justified in the name of slowing global warming? Realistically, how severe CAN measures be before one or more major countries would say “go to hell” and simply refuse to follow them?
I’d say limiting global warming is more important than living with our current lifestyle. I’d be willing to go pretty far, but just living without half of the stupid shitty knicknacks we have now would be a big step in the right direction.
Consumerism is making everyone rich, but I think there’s only so much of it the environment can take before all those trips to Wal-Mart and all those tons of bobble-head production factory pollutants start to add up in a bad way.
edit: typo.
To answer the 2nd part of your question:
China, India, and America have resisted virtually all attempts to prevent pollution on a global scale. The “severe measures” threshold seems to be pretty low.
Well logically, I would think that countries should estimate how much it would cost to fix problems arising from global warming, and then be willing to spend up to that much on mitigating global warming. I mean, it’s easy to understand why they’d be concerned about the costs of mitigation being high. But what if it costs billions to make changes that could help prevent/reduce global warming, but it costs trillions (and many lives) to do nothing.
Of course, most countries/people don’t think like that. They’re in denial, or they shift blame to others, or the say it’s too expensive, or they just shove it off on the next generation.
This is a good point. In the global warming debate people should keep in mind that it might be cheaper in terms of opportunity cost to deal with the consequences of global warming than it would be to avoid it.
For example, forgone growth do to carbon restrictions could be greater than the cost of shifting agricultural production and fighting more malaria exposure.
Again, I’ll emphasize that I don’t know which offsetting effect would be larger, but I do know that: a) constraining carbon output would constrain growth, b) economic growth is a great way to help the very poor (who will probably be most effected by climate change) and c) some problems associated with global warming are probably easier to solve than some doom and gloom folks paint them.
I vote not. The latest IPCC report estimates that to stabilize the CO2 concentration in the range of 445-535ppm (which is the lowest range that they consider), the world GDP growth rate through 2050 would be reduced by less than 0.12% per year. Considering that growth rate is expected to average somewhere over 3% per year, a reduction of at most 0.12% does not a depression make.
As Waenara notes, one could do a cost-benefit analysis. However, there are various uncertainties and difficulties with that. For example, there are uncertainties about the science, uncertainties about the economic and ecological effects of climate change, issues of how you put a monetary value on (say) 1/3 of species being doomed to extinction, issues of what sort of “discount rate” one uses for money over time…which at least partly involves value judgements, etc., etc.
Perhaps a better approach is an approach that seeks to understand how we can minimize our risk…i.e., essentially hedge our bets and “buy insurance” until such time as we have a better understanding of some of the uncertainties. Along these lines, there was a paper published in Science a few years ago entitled “To hedge or not to hedge against an uncertain climate future”. The abstract says:
What they basically did is assumed that today there is still considerable uncertainty regarding the climate sensitivity to rises in CO2 and regarding a global temperature that we want to avoid going above because the effects of climate change become severe but that we would essentially know the answer to these two questions with a reasonable degree of accuracy in 2035. The question is, given what we know today about this, what is the best strategy to take (in order to minimize costs…and not complete foreclose too many options) in the interum? The nice result was that a good strategy, which was to “buy insurance” by imposing a moderate and increasing carbon tax over time ($10 / ton today rising to $33 / ton in 2035), was fairly robust, i.e., it did not depend very strongly on what the answer to these two questions ended up being.
jshore, good to hear from you. I took a look at the study you cited re Hedging. The problem, as with all studies of this type, is that it depends very much on your assumptions. They have made some dubious assumptions in their study.
First, the IPCC gives the likely range for the climate sensitivity as being from 1.5° to 4.5° for a doubling of CO2. Your study, however, assumes that the sensitivity has a 90% chance of being between 1.0 and 9.3° per doubling, with over half of the estimates being outside the IPCC range … seems doubtful, I don’t see any climate models giving numbers that high.
The second assumption that they make is that the carbon tax would be applied worldwide. This is extremely unlikely. India and China are most probably wouldn’t sign on, for example.
The third assumption is that the market is perfectly elastic, that is to say, that consumption will fall if the price is raised. However, the record of gasoline usage in the US with respect to rising prices suggests that there will not be much change. Much of the driving that people do is simply not optional - they are driving to work, to the doctor, or some other destination which they cannot avoid. Furthermore, a gallon of gasoline contains 2.42 kg carbon, so a $10/tonne carbon tax would add about 3 cents to the cost of a gallon … I don’t think that will do anything to people’s driving habits at all.
With assumptions like those, you can “prove” anything … but it may end up having little relation to the real world.
w.
I couldn’t care less about global warming, and don’t intend to do the slightest thing about it. I can expand on this if you want.
I think the perspective on this is wrong. Getting the entire world to reduce doing things is something that will be very hard to do, and impossible to enforce compliance without creating totalitarianism.
We should be focusing on trying to innovate our way past this. How can we reduce and eliminate these problems on a global scale in a way that provides someone with a benefit? Can we build giant sky scrubbers? (I’m almost not joking: solar shades are a fun concept to toy with. Power plants in the sky.)
Is it possible to transform heat to electricity, then electricity to light, and beam lasers at Mars to warm it up?
Think big.
Also, of course, build for the future. More nuclear power plants, less coal and oil dependence.
The same bloke who thinks ‘nigger’ isn’t racist abuse and that rape within marriage is relatively acceptable has a controversial viewpoint on global warming? Surely not…
I’m not sure Global Warming is occuring - all the research I’ve seen that says it is occurring appears flawed to me (as does the research that says it isn’t). And it has gotten a little too much of a “everybody knows” justification in the last few years for me to not call bullshit on a lot of the hype. I’d like to see much better reasearch. And “modelling” isn’t research. It’s bullshit.
I’m not sure Global Warming is a problem - Earth’s temperature is has never been stable: it appears to always have been cooling or warming - if we were faced with global cooling, would we now look for drastic measures to heat up? Does global warming, if it is happening at all, actually cause problems like flooding? Is the ice melting everywhere, or is the aggregate ice-loss worldwide maybe limited due to ice growing in other areas? How much of a flood, where? Do the greenhouse gasses maybe create higher crop yields world-wide, well of-setting negative impacts ?
Is Co2 actually causing Global Warming - if it is occuring at all? is it the main cause? will limiting emmissions really “fix the problem”?
Really, limiting emissions of Co2, which might or might not fix the cause of a phenomenon that might not be occuring, and which phenomenom might not be a problem at all seems a really dumb idea. But hey, at least it’s PC, right? and it fits the dogma we all have to concur with for fear of being called idiots, right wing fundies, irresponsible, rapers of the planet and a plethora of other knee jerk responses.
Well, there are steps we can take that would be good things to do in their own right. Things like reducing our dependence on oil. Insulating houses. Finding inefficient uses of energy. Making users of energy pay for externalities that they currently push onto the general public. Stop subsidizing energy-intensive agriculture.
Lots of things like these would be good ideas even if global climate change was not a factor. That they also might mitigate the costs of global climate change is a bonus.
The trouble we have right now is that there are certain people who don’t even want to start on that road, because to do so would be to stipulate that more radical steps might be needed later. Stop the easy steps now, and we’ll never have to make the radical steps. Unfortuneately, that presumes that worries about global climate change are all a big scam.
I agree that there are certain people who are going to use the spectre of global climate change to try to push certain agendas…increase government power, increase taxation, deindustrialize western countries, destroy capitalism, and so on. But I have a hunch that the American citizenry doesn’t have any appetite for those experiments, and worries that we’ll be bamboozled into a totalitarian socialist dictatorship if we switch to compact flourescent bulbs seem misplaced.
Why? We have international treaties to ban the manufacture of CFCs and other ozone-layer-destroying substances. I agree that it is not easy…but I don’t see why it has to be impossible without creating totalitarianism.
Well, innovation is a good thing but why are you limiting the innovative ideas to these sorts of geo-engineering things? Why not innovations like glass windows on buildings that automatically adjust to admit or exclude solar radiation as desired to reduce heating and cooling needs and other things that conserve energy?
These things are much less likely to have the sort of “swallow the spider to catch the fly” sort of negative impacts. And, geoengineering techniques that only deal with the climate effects of CO2 don’t deal with the problem of ocean acidification.
That is not to say that geoengineering possibilities shouldn’t be considered…but they should not be used as an excuse not to take other actions unless one is identified that can very clearly solve the problems of increasing CO2 levels without other severe side effects.
At any rate, the first step is to put a price on the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Without that, there is no economic incentive to innovate in any way and the only innovation you are going to get is that done by government money or by people who are doing it just for the good of humanity.
Off the top of my head, I would say that this probably violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I.e., you can’t decrease entropy of a closed system…and transforming heat into electricity would tend to decrease entropy, so you are going to have to increase entropy elsewhere to do this. In the end, what I think would happen is that the energy expended to do the conversion would more than cancel out any beneficial effect.
Well, the way you reduce dependence on coal and oil is to force them to bear their full costs including their cost on our environment. I don’t think subsidizing nuclear power is really the answer as that is choosing a “winner” that has its own issues. Better to make the fossil fuels pay their full costs and then if nuclear becomes more economical as a result, it may play a large role in the solutions that the market comes up with.
The biggest contribution to atmospheric CO2 is the use of motor vehicles. One way to reduce motor vehicle emissions is to reduce traffic jams. How about offering tax incentives for firms to alter their business hours? instead of having gas-wasting 'rush hour" traffic jams, you could have business hours that would allow people to travel at times of less than peak demand.
And burning coal: increase the price of coal, and decrease taxes on nuclear-generated electricity.
finally: stop subsidizing waste of energy: stop allowing the Post office to offer cheap rates for junk mail-i wind up throwing most of it away. And: encourage conservation 9via tax credits).
Remember, though, that if it isn’t, that would contradict some pretty basic atmospheric physics.
The theory of the basic “greenhouse effect”, where increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases produce increased global temperatures, is considered to be pretty well understood. According to the theory, if we pump lots of extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we should see global temperatures rise. And it’s pretty much undisputed that we have been pumping lots of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So the theory predicts that we will experience rising global temperatures.
Now, that doesn’t automatically settle the question, because global climate is a very complex system. Maybe there are in fact some subsidiary climate mechanisms that are not yet well understood that are somehow counteracting the basic “greenhouse effect” of our extra CO2. If so, though, nobody has yet figured out what they are, how they work, or why they are more powerful than the “greenhouse effect” itself.
What?! You wild-eyed radical, you. 
It is an absolute scientific fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It is a scientific fact that several other chemicals such as methane are also greenhouse gases. It is a scientific fact that measured global atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising steadily since measurements were first taken. It is a scientific fact that human burning of sequestered carbon in oil and coal has released large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
None of this is arguable. However, what IS arguable is what exactly it all means. CO2 doesn’t just stay in the atmosphere, in fact while we know that we’ve released quite a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, somewhere around half of it is not present in the atmosphere. It’s been sequestered somewhere…in the biomass or in the ocean. We know that CO2 gets sequestered, that’s where all that coal came from in the first place.
And of course, we don’t know how much this CO2 will raise temperatures, we just have a very justified belief that it must raise temperatures to some extent. And this has the problem that there’s a lot of ice still left over from the Pleistocene up on Antarctica and Greenland, and if it all melted sea levels would rise considerably. We know that sea levels have risen and fallen dramatically in the past, during glacial periods you could walk from Siberia to Alaska, or from London to Paris. And we know that global CO2 levels have risen and fallen in the past.
So, what to do about all this? It seems to me that modest reductions in CO2 emissions along with large reductions in stronger greenhouse gases are in order. Personally, I’d rather see New Orleans underwater than submit to a totalitarian dictatorship, but this is a false dilemna. In the first place, if we submitted to a totalitarian dictatorship, the first thing the dictator will do is forget all about global climate change and instead concentrate on tightening his grip on power.
Let’s look at what the experts say. The IPCC says in its latest report that
In regards to cause, they say
[“Very likely” in IPCC-speak means a greater than 90% estimated confidence.]
If you are allergic to anything that is in any way associated with the UN, you could instead consider what the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in conjunction with its counterparts in major nations like Britain, France, Canada, Japan, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan has said here [PDF file]. Why should we believe your evaluation of the state of the research over theirs?
And, as Kimstu and Lemur866 have noted, that the rises of CO2 levels that we are producing are and will continue to cause warming follows from basic physics. And, while the climate system is admittedly very complicated, the fact is that all the climate models with their various different approximations and parametrizations all predict a climate sensitivity roughly in the same range. Furthermore, various estimates of the climate sensitivity can be made by looking at the estimated changes in temperature and radiative forcings between the ice ages and interglacial periods (such as the one we are in now) and these support the same range of climate sensitivity.
Well, looking over geologic time periods, the earth has also had things such as major asteroid impacts but I am sure you wouldn’t consider a large asteroid headed for a collision with the earth to not be a problem. The fact is that human civilization has developed during the relatively stable climate period of the last 10,000 years. Furthermore, you have to recognize that the rate of change is very important. During the transitions between ice ages and interglacials, typical rates of warming were on the order of 0.1 to 0.2 C per century. Now, we are warming the planet at the rate of ~0.2 C per decade. Not only does this rate make it more difficult on various ecosystems but these ecosystems are already stressed from other human influences and they are fragmented by human development in ways that make it more difficult for them to migrate poleward (or up in elevation).
As for sea level rise, first it should be noted that the largest component of the predicted rise over the next 100 years or so is simply due to the thermal expansion of the water…i.e., as it warms, it takes up more volume. Second, it is true that climate models predict some increase in snowfall on the land ice sheets, which partially compensates the melting. However, unfortunately, the growth of ice sheets is basically a linear process whereas the evidence is increasing that the disintegration of them is not…because, for example, melt water can get underneath and cause lubrication so that the ice slides. Thus, the disintegration would tend to win out.
And, yes, there will be some cold regions that could benefit from a longer growing season and such. But, as a general rule, people have adapted to the climate that exists so there will tend to be more losers than winners…especially as the changes get larger.
intention, as always it is good to read what you have to say.
Several points here:
(1) This is what the IPCC says in its latest report about climate sensitivity: “It is likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C,and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values.” So, that means the chance that it is in the range of 2 to 4.5 C is estimated to be greater than 66% and the chance that it is less than 1.5 C is estimated to be less than 10%.
(2) This does not seem to be in any real contradiction with the climate sensitivity shown in the study: The weight in the range of 2 to 4.5 C is somewhat less than the IPCC would suggest…but in fact, much of this weight has been transferred to the low end: The discretized sensitivity they use gives a weight of 30% to the 1.5 C value and another 20% to the 2 C value (see Table S1 of the supplementary material).
(3) As far as I can tell, this sensitivity weighting impacts essentially none of what they say in their actual article, although it does have impact on some of the supplementary materials. For example, the table they show in the article gives costs as a function of the sensitivity, so if you don’t like the high sensitivities, just ignore the last few lines and focus on the other ones.
Agreed. But, as they noted, while you can change the numbers by various modifications of assumptions, the general conclusion on the utility of hedging seems to be quite robust.
I don’t know how you know what their assumption is about the elasticity of the market and don’t even know what “perfectly elastic means”. Does that mean infinitely elastic? No, they clearly don’t assume that. What they presumably assume is a certain elasticity … or perhaps a different short term and long term elasticity that reflects, for example, how people can make changes over the long term (such as buying more fuel efficient cars) that they don’t make over the short term. And, I would assume that the DICE model bases the elasticity on some sort of empirical evidence, however imperfect that may be.
Well, they calculate it at 5 cents a gallon (perhaps because they use per ton…i.e., perhaps 2000 lbs rather than per metric tonne). I do agree this sounds fairly low; however, you have to remember that it is going to rise over time with the rate of interest…and that it is going to apply to similar sources of carbon beyond just gasoline.
Well, I am not going to claim that this study is perfect or the last word. However, the whole point of their study is that you can make some fairly basic assumptions about the state of your uncertainty and come up with some conclusions that seem to be fairly robust … i.e., that you can change some of the numbers around by changing your assumptions in using the model but that the basic conclusion that it is a better strategy to hedge than to do nothing is very robust.
jshore, you keep saying the results of the “Hedging” paper are “robust”. The authors themselves say:
However, this does not begin to exhaust what the specific cost estimates are “highly dependent on”. To take just one example, they say that economic damages from warming (relative to 1990) are given by
D(t) = theta1 T(t) + theta2 T(t)^2
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, they neglect to say what values for theta1 and theta2 they are using … but they say they are both positive. In addition, they also must assume that they are large, since the damages they estimate are in the billions of dollars.
Of course, this implies that the ~ 1° temperature rise between say 1850 and 2000 has also been associated with billions in costs … perhaps you’d be so kind as to tell us where those costs can be found in the historical record?
And where is the theoretical basis for the assumption that damages due to temperature rise are quadratic, or even that the damages outweigh the benefits? The world has warmed greatly since the “Little Ice Age”, and it has generally been of benefit to humans … cold is much more life-threatening than warmth. Running the authors “DICE” model starting in 1650 would forecast trillions of dollars in damages … where are they?
Finally, the increases in temperature over the last century have generally come in the temperate regions, in the night-time, in the winter … could you explain exactly how warmer winters in Norway will cause quadratically increasing damage?
jshore, you are a scientist. You must be aware that projections depend on assumptions, and if you pick the assumptions you like, anything can be forecast. Yes, if you assume the climate sensitivity is high, and that a 1° temperature rise will cost us billions of dollars, and that consumers will respond to a 3¢ per gallon tax on gasoline by reducing their driving, and that rising temperatures cause only damages with no benefits, and that the damages increase quadratically, you can make a case for carbon tax … but I see no evidence for any of those assumptions.
The authors have a climate model connected to an economic model that predicts doom unless we act now … you’ll have to pardon me if I’m not impressed. Describing the results of a combined climate/economic model as “robust” without testing either their climate model or their economic assumptions in the real world is … well, it’s a lot of things, but “robust” is not one of them.
All the best,
w.
As usual, intention, you inadvertently make your arguments more difficult to follow by being a little vague about exactly where you’re getting your direct cites. Just for clarification, the equation that you quote here is not in the Science article itself by Yohe et al. whose abstract jshore originally linked to here, but on page 3 of the article’s supplementary material found in this PDF file.
As for the allegedly additional uncertainty of the estimates due to theta1 and theta2, the authors state quite clearly:
It seems easily evident from this that the theta1 and theta2 values are coming from the aforementioned DICE-99 model. In other words, the values of theta1 and theta2 are part of the very same “global modeling context of the DICE-99 model” upon which the authors already acknowledged their estimates to be “highly dependent”.
So your suggestion that the values of theta1 and theta2 somehow constitute an extra source of dependency that the authors have disingenuously failed to acknowledge appears to be incorrect.
As for what the values of theta1 and theta2 are in the DICE-99 model, one has to refer to the source mentioned by the authors in the very first sentence of their supplementary material thus:
This reference is cited in full at the end of the supplementary material as follows: W.D. Nordhaus, J. Boyer, Warming the World—Economic Models of Global
Warming (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001).
You frequently like to insinuate that climate scientists are dishonestly concealing their data, but I don’t think you’ve got a case here. The authors stated very clearly that they’re basing their computations on models described in a fully cited source, and I don’t think the reader has cause to grumble just because they don’t bother to explicitly re-define all the notation that the source is using. Clearly, the reader who wishes to know more about theta1 and theta2 is expected to consult Nordhaus & Boyer directly.