Hurray USA - emmissions

Great Debates
21

Don’t bogart that joint, Shodan. At this time, China is the second largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the U.S. I don’t know where India fits on the list, but it obviously comes after #1 America. My source is last week’s Time magazine. I’m sure you can find the article at http://www.time.com .

Bush’s big goof was rejecting Kyoto without having an alternative plan. Personally, I think that Kyoto should be scrapped in favor of a plan that calls for smaller short-term cuts and much, much deeper long-term cuts, as the current polluting technologies runs through their life-cycles. This allows time for greener technologies to become more developed and more economical, and would result in the same amount, or even greater cuts, emissions cuts. As one example, hydrogen fuel-cell technology, which I am deeply excited about (it may even inspire me to buy a car ;)), needs more time to be economically feasible.

By failing to present an alternative plan, Bush left himself wide open to accusations of being pro-pollution. Quite frankly, given his track record, it is quite possible that he doesn’t believe that global warming is occurring. If true, that would be the ever-present (on the left and the right), sad triumph of ideology over facts.

Sua

22

Shodan, meet egkelly. :rolleyes: Man, whoever’s distributing the script for you guys has a pretty effective organization going there.

So to sum up, Huw, the proposed candidates for “unselfish and unbiased” reasons for US abandonment of the Kyoto Protocols so far are as follows:

Akatsukami: (1) The thousands of scientists endorsing the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are wrong: there is in fact no substantive reason to think that anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem requiring emissions controls on our part. [Here, I join jshore in thinking that we ought to see some evidence of Akatsukami’s superior scientific credentials before we buy this argument. After all, I know people who oppose the prevailing scientific consensus on the feasibility of perpetual motion machines too, but I don’t look to them for advice on national energy policy.]

(2) “There is suggestive evidence” that the Kyoto accords are intended (at least by some parties) primarily as an attack on the US economy. [I can’t help wondering why **Akatsukami** has so much looser standards for evidence supporting political conspiracy theories than for evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change; I have a feeling it is mostly a question of which theory he personally wants to believe.]

egkelly and Shodan, speaking practically in unison: (1) The Kyoto accords are just a disguised attack on the US economy. [Again, I see this as essentially mere American political narcissism. The idea that thousands of scientists and policymakers worldwide have been sweating away for the past decade on a vast and hugely complex set of scientific, social, economic, and technological problems merely as a pretext to destroy the American economy whose collapse would be very disadvantageous to them does not seem to me worthy of a sane person’s consideration.]

(2) Major emitters among the developing countries, such as China and India, are resisting voluntary emissions controls. [Why this should be taken as the guide for US policy is beyond me: reasoning along the lines of “if he won’t clean up his room then I’m not going to clean up mine” IMHO does not count as rational policymaking for anyone who’s passed beyond the third grade. If refusal by China and India to participate in emissions reduction is a problem for the global climate, then that just makes it all the more imperative for the US, which easily tops them as a polluter, to reduce its own global environmental impact. Moreover, this objection ignores the fact that if the developed countries join in a swift and vigorous development of clean technologies, they will be more likely to be successful later in encouraging the Third World to do so, and more effective in leaning on countries that don’t cooperate. Remember that as Third World countries get closer to their projected peaks of industrialization in the next couple of decades, they will need our cooperation and our markets in order to sustain their growth.]

So Huw, if none of those strikes you as a good reason for US rejection of the Kyoto accords, I’m afraid you’re not likely to see any better ones around here.

Actually, Sua’s arguments probably qualify, although I didn’t count them so far because I was looking only at the category “reasons to reject Kyoto as part of a larger policy of doing jacksh*t-diddly about US emissions”. :slight_smile: Turning now to the category of “reasons to reject Kyoto in favor of a better policy for reducing US emissions”, I think Sua makes some good points, although to my mind the scientific, economic, and political advantages of getting a major global cooperative emissions-reduction program in place as soon as possible probably outweigh the advantages of achieving a slightly better program at the cost of more years of initial delay.

I’d also like to point out (and this speaks to Blackclaw too) that not attaining all the specified short-term goals within the treaty’s time frame is hardly the worst thing in the world. Remember, we didn’t achieve all the goals of our own Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act within the original time frames, and in fact we’re not in full compliance with them nationwide even yet. But few people (especially those who remember the smog and the burning rivers of the 60’s and 70’s) would object that therefore it was a mistake to enact them! Mandating better environmental policies really has helped to clean up the environment, even if the details and the deadlines have always had to be modified. Allowing pollution to continue at current levels while we tinker to produce the perfect plan for eliminating it is likely to do more harm than good.

Recall also that some people have always been threatening dire economic disaster as a result of environmental protection. Looking at the economy in the 80’s and the 90’s, you’d never know that there were all sorts of awful warnings from the 60’s and 70’s counterparts of Shodan and egkelly that the Clean Air and Water Acts would cripple our economy and reduce us to a fifth-rate economic power and pave the way for our imminent domination by (of course) the Russians. Different stage, same old song.

Of course, hysterical alarmism is hardly confined to one side of the environmental debate: there were also various confident predictions that by the end of the century we’d all be simultaneously starving from overpopulation and dying of pesticide poisoning. I fully expect that many of the gloomiest predictions of the climate-change people (just like the economic doomsaying of egkelly and Shodan) will turn out to be as unfounded as many earlier ones were. But if you strip the hysterical alarmism from both sides, it seems to me that simple common sense makes it clear which position is the more sensible and prudent one. After all, we already know that pollution is damaging to living things, and that extremely large quantities of pollution can be extremely damaging. Which makes more sense in the long run: to shut our eyes to the eventual consequences and refuse to change our policies as long as we can get away with it, or to start working now on seriously reducing our pollution output?

(And thanks, Needs, Abe, Dumbguy, you made my day! :))

23

Kimstu, I’m willing to grant you that it may be better politically to get Kyoto or its like going now. Momentum is vital. I’m not willing to grant the scientific (even if Kyoto were fully implemented now, global temperatures will still continue to rise for decades - the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere aren’t going away soon. Smaller cuts now, with very large cuts later would have the same effect on warming, or so my reading tells me.), or the economic (per my earlier post).

Quite frankly, Hugehuw, you Europeans have to bear much of the blame for the collapse of Kyoto. Your governments’ instransigence at the Hague (that’s where the last meeting was held, right?) over the use of carbon sinks and market mechanisms to reduce the total amount of CO2 emitted made Kyoto unworkable. The idea is to reduce the amount of CO2 that makes it into the atmosphere, right? Then why were your governments so pissy about how those reductions were made?

Sua

24

I’m an American who is definately of a like mind with ya, Huw

25

While I don’t know the details of the US and European negotiating positions at the end of the Hague talks, I do think there will good arguments to be made both for limiting the use of carbon sinks and for putting limits on international emissions trading. For the carbon sinks, the science of carbon sequestration is not all that well understood; in fact, right around the time of the Hague talks, there was a paper published suggesting it may be a lot less effective than naively estimated.

For the international emissions trading, one problem was that the amount of credits awarded to some of the Eastern bloc countries was so excessive in comparison to what they will use that it screws things up…I had a cite on this in a previous thread but can’t dig it up now. But, to make a long story short, no…allowing such unrestricted trading would not result in the same amount of greenhouse gases getting into the atmosphere as would be the case if every country was held to their limits because some countries won’t even hit their limits if they try to! Now, I suppose you can argue this is a defect in Kyoto and clearly it is. However, I guess revisiting those limits is not feasible and so it is now necessary to put restrictions on international emissions trading in order to not render Kyoto meaningless.

26

jshore writes:

Thank you for the compliment. Actually, though, I have little more scientific training than you. I merely prefer to look at as much data and as many opinions as possible, rather than relying on the media’s spin of how UN bureaucrats write executive summaries of technical reports.

HugeHuw writes:

Perhaps “pragmatic” was a poor choice, and I should have gone with “realistic” or “factual” instead. If you like, I will withdraw that word, and simply say that there is no evidence whatsodamnever that Kyoto will do any real good.

Huw goes on to say:

Of course global warming can be bad. So can global cooling; look at the Würm glaciation.

Despite the increasingly frantic attempts of the global warming industry to prove otherwise, the evidence is that global temperatures have been warmer than they are now in historical times. That fact is damaging to the GW industry’s position in two respects. First, whilst it certainly does not prove that there is not a strong anthropogenic component to the current warming trend, it puts paid to the notion that some unprecedented mechanism – viz., anthropogenic emissions of CO[sub]2[/sub] – are necessary to explain it. Second, it also makes unsupportable the idea that we are entering into unknown territory, and that we must rely on the disingenuous pronouncements of the modelers instead actually doing the tedious work of looking through the archives.

As for the language – I prefer to avoid the muddy thinking and absolute pronouncements of the global warming industry. Will some people suffer because the climate is growing warmer? Certainly. If we return the climate to the way it was in 1750, will people also suffer? Equally certainly, and that suffering will occur regardless of the method chosen (some, of course, would cause more suffering than others).

27

Really now, that is a gross mischaracterization of the IPCC report.

I’m fairly disappointed this sort of nonesense is bandied about still.

The IPCC and attendant materials are based on a fairly wide-ranging scientific consensus, or as the Economist noted in this weeks issue (7-13 April), “It is notable that even such heavy-weight companies as Ford, BP and Royal Dutch Shcell, all of which opposed Kyoto have since shifted their positions towards supporting its general aims, if not its specific targets. This is because they recognise the overwhelming consensus among the climate scientists is that global warming is real, … and that evidence of man’s role in it is strong enough to warrant some action now.” (p. 82)

Now, of course the Ecnomist is neither a peer-reviewed journal nor always impeccable on science issues. However, I feel comfortable in suggesting that your evaluation has all the balance of an anchor.

But, I have time constraints so instead of going round the posy, let me link the discussion “Faith Based Science”
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=63537
wherein I believe I cite an adequate amount of peer reviewed literature (either throught the IPCC or through PNAS etc.) to suggest your evaluation is seriously lacking.

Rubbish. It all depends on one’s assumptions of course, and the methadology of application, but increased energy efficencies would be a good thing regardless of the warming debate. Mind you, as the linked past discussion will show, I am not a great fan of Kyoto, but your statement in re “no evidence whatsodamnever” is simply ** false ** – albeit with the caveat that “real good” is a rather subjective turn of phrase.

Really man, this sort of argument is unworthy of the electricity used.

And this is also unworthy.

Sigh, you’ve been reading the ideological literature instead of science again, haven’t you? The turns of phrase are positively lifted from it.

Again, not only unworthy, sad.

Muddy thinking comes from reading hack attacks on science, not reading the science. I rather expected better of you. Your attacks on a so-called “global warming” industry reflect some of the worst tripe I have read in a while.

There are critiques to be made, and I have made them here on this board, of Kyoto, approaches to the problem. This, however, is not one of them.

28

The following petition has been signed by over 17,000 people. Two thirds have advanced degrees. Signers of this petition so far include 2,660 physicists,geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists. Frederick Seitz, Past President, National Academy of Sciences, is responsible for starting this petition. The site listed below goes in to more detail.
Global Warming Petition

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Please sign here ______________________________________

My academic degree is B.S. ___ M.S. ___ Ph.D. ___

in the field of _______________________________________

Please enter your name and address here:

Name

Street

City, State, and Zip

Please send more petition cards for me to distribute.__

Please print, sign, and send to:

Petition Project, P.O. Box 1925 La Jolla CA 92038-1925

http://www.oism.org/pproject/

OTOH, Time magazine got Walter Cronkite to sign their petition.

29

I don’t see why global warming is any worse than global cooling, and one or the other has to happen. The temperature is not going to stay the same. Of course extended global warming could be bad. However in the next 100 years from what I’ve seen predictions of increases in say hurricanes are around 2% among other things. Its just not enough to get worked up over.

30

First of all, let me say that IMHO the only difference between the Dubya and Dan Quayle is the Dubya got to be President and Danny boy didn’t. I have to say that I think Bush was right to dis the Kyoto Accords, not because I happen to disagree with the theory of global warming, but because what tends to happen is that folks like myself on the lower end of the economic scale tend to get screwed. (Yes, I know we’ll all get screwed if the environment goes to hell, which it just might.)

I’m not talking blathering on like an idiot because I forgot to take my medication, but because I got nailed by the enacting of emissions laws a few years ago. I live roughly 30 miles outside of the closest major metropolitan (Nashville, TN) area and until about 7 years ago there were no emissions tests in this state. The EPA told Nashville to improve its air quality and the metro government decided to enact emissions testing for all gasoline powered cars built after 1974.

This meant that overnight the price of USED cars which could pass emissions tests jumped by at least $1000 (the price of pre-1974 cars also jumped). Why? Because they knew lots of people were going to have to either get their cars repaired or buy one that could pass emissions.

No big worry for me, at the time, because I didn’t live in Davidson county where Nashville’s located and so I wasn’t didn’t have to worry if my car could pass emissions or not. (I knew it wouldn’t and I really couldn’t afford to get it fixed. The car needed new brakes, tranny, radiator, tires, and was uninsured because I couldn’t afford to make the insurance payments.)

Well, Nashville wasn’t able to clean up its air because it turned out that many of the cars driven in Nashville were from surrounding counties, so they expanded the testing to include the other counties. The reason given for why the county I lived in went to emissions testing and not requiring, say, industrial pollutors to clean up their act was because it was felt that it would cost too many jobs (i.e. they’d close down the plants and move, or decide not to locate a plant there to begin with).

I busted my ass trying to save up enough money to get the problems with my car fixed, but I couldn’t make it in time as the repairs to things like the tranny, brakes, and tires sucked up most of my income. (As an aside I’d like to ask: Which kind of vehicle is more dangerous to the public at large, one that spews excess pollution, but is in good mechanical condition otherwise, or one that meets its emissions level but is lacking things like decent brakes, tires, or other equipment which might keep the driver from losing control of the vehicle during normal operation?) So I did what lots of people do: registered my car in another county that didn’t have emissions testing. Illegal, but what choice did I have? Don’t say mass-transit because that simply doesn’t exist in any real manner in this state.

Yes, I know there’s a policy that allows people to get a variance if they’ve spent more than X amount of dollars getting their car fixed and it still won’t pass emissions, but you know what? There’s like ONE guy who does the inspections which means there’s a long waiting list, assuming you can even get hold of the guy to set up an appointment for him to look at the car! If I thought for a moment, that Bush and the other politicos could enforce the Kyoto Accord in a manner which wouldn’t screw me over (I’m not asking for the right to drive an excessively polluting car, I’d love to have a car that DIDN’T pollute excessively, but I CAN’T afford one!) I’d be for it in a minute.

The simple facts are that if the US endorses such a treaty, then the poor folks (and yes, I know a poor American is better off than a poor Ethiopian, or Chinese, or whatever other Developing Nation citizen you care to name, that doesn’t mean we have the right to strip away from the American what little he/she’s managed to earn to try and make things “even” which you can’t really do anyway) are going to be the ones to suffer, not the corporate fat cats, or even the leaders of the environmental movement. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.

A simple solution was worked out in Arizona. The state gave rebates to anyone who bought an alternatively fueled vehicle. This was so successful that the state’s had to discontinue the program because so many people were taking advantage of it that it was threatening to bankrupt the state.

Were the Dubya to see the light and say that anyone (including corporations) to invest in non or low polluting methods for developing energy (solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric) they’d get to write 100% of their expenses on their taxes and any income on surplus energy that they sold to the local utilities was tax free, then I’d be all for it. If he were to do that, emissions wouldn’t be a worry and California wouldn’t be in the dark half the time now.

Sorry this is so long. Hope somebody actually reads it.

31

I’m * sure * Captain Nemo understands that petitions are not science, but politics.

In re Asmodean:

Global warming is of concern because the balance of the evidence indicates (a) human activity is an important contributor (b) the predicted temperature is rapid © high enough to cause seriour issues in re ecological losses from (relatively) rapid climatic zone shifting, lowland flooding to an extent, more serious variability in near term climate as in droughts and flooding.

As I’ve noted in other threads on this matter, the meatiest of which is linked, insofar as many measures recommended are also recommendable on a medium to long term economic basis regardless of the ecological question, some action is highly recommendable. All the whinging about “energy crisis” really is the most hypocritical cover for ditching a global warming treaty: much of the current issues in re energy derive from nothing less than fairly spendthrift energy habits. Achieving greater energy efficiency would go a long ways to improving our long term economic performance (as well as a greater savings rate, but that’s another issue) as well as reducing political vulnerabilities.

I suggest you consult the Economist’s recent article for a good overview.

In re Tuckerfan:

Increased energy efficiency should help American production in the medium term, leading to better pay for you, assuming you’re somewhere in mfging. As for pollution testing etc. this is not actually global warming issues, alhtough marginally connected in some respects. However, I am sure you saw benefits from the process alhtough you only noted the up front costs.

The latter is the great problem with achieving medium to long term gains. Myopically everyone focuses on up front costs to the exclusion of benefits in the next term. Unbalanced analysis.

32

Kimstu,

Sorry about the delay in my response. I’ve been out of town.

I do think the US should try for emmission reduction, my concern is that treaties which are not complied with tend to degrade in the eyes of those by whom the treaties should be binding. After the US fails to abide by the Kyoto treaty one year and suffers no penalty it will have very little incentive to try for the next benchmark year either. Of course even this is preferred than not trying at all.

I think an emissions treaty with attainable goals can be agreed to by the US, but I’m afraid in the current political climate amide recession fears it will have to wait a few years.

33

Collounsbury writes:

I agree; it is a gross mischaracterization of the Third Assessment Report (TAR). It is not a gross mischaracterization of the Executive Summary of the TAR – which is what discussions generally point to, and is what is available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/spm22-01.pdf.

Oh? How so? If you re-read the statement that inspired it, you will see that it is in fact not an argument for or against global warming, its anthropogenicity, or its effects; I agree that to point to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene is meaningless in that kind of argument. However, I offered it as an example of why I will not make the kind of absolute statements that the popular partisans of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis like to make.

No, I’ve been reading both. The other side of this argument seems so far to be limited to discussion as to whether Bush’s refusal to demand ratification of Kyoto of the Senate is due to his stupidity or his corruption (with the weight of opinion in this thread seeming to be corruption). Given these ideologically-motivated attacks on anything save a complete capitulation to the demands of those banging the anthropogenic global warming drum, I respectfully decline to concede them everything that they call for, and try to proceed from there. Once we have do not pretend a priori that not ratifying Kyoto with all possible speed is not a national disgrace and a callous threat to life as we know it, we can discuss the matter without phrases as “global warming industry” or “you are dead on in characterizing [Bush] as a swaggering, arrogant idiot” (not your phrase, I agree).

blackclaw writes:

Actually, the BBC reports the EU is ready to renegotiate the Kyoto protocol, although, whatever the results, it still may not fit people’s definitions of “attainable” and “effective”.

34

The Kyoto treaty was dead long before Dubya ever made his statement. In fact, it was dead the instant Clinton finished his signature.

Posted by Akatsukami:

Clinton had absolutely no support for Kyoto in the Senate, they voted against it 95-0 fer chrissake. If the treaty was dependant on American support for its success, it was terribly irresponsible for the parties negotiating it to structure the terms such that US ratification would be impossible. Clinton knew (or should have known) how little support there would be in the Senate for the agreed upon terms, and should have never signed it. By signing it, the treaty was set up for an inevitable fall in the Senate, destroying any effectiveness it might have had in reducing worldwide emissions.

The negotiations for this treaty were screwed up from the start. If US involvement is critical, you are going to need more than ZERO support in the US ratifying body. They failed to put together tems that even one US senator would vote in favor of, that speaks volumes. Clinton should have been straight with everyone about the lack of support for the treaty and negotiated terms that would be more agreeable to the US Senate. If he had, we might have a treaty, albeit less agressive, that would have been ratified years ago, and would be making a difference today.

As we have it, this treaty is dead in the water, even if Dubya loved it, the Senate would never ratify it, and the US would never be bound by its terms.

35

Actually this is a problem. Not insurmountable, but it is a problem. Unilateral action or action which does not capture the majority of countries important to the issue has a tendency to break down. We can see this emprically as well as through game theoretical modelling.

The question is how do China and India work into this? What approaches are there to deal with a potential free-rider issue in re China and India.

I don’t have time to go into this since its a bit complicated and I have projects up the wazoo, but let me suggest the following very briefly:
(a) Integration and wealth effect:
(i) trade integration by both countries should make their economies more sensitive to outside world as well as increase wealth.
(ii) outside connections and sensitivity thereto make each country more concerned about its international rep, as well as the possibilities of multilateral trade sanctions. Insofar as WTO has not ressovled this yet its hard to say if environmental trade sanctions are permissable but comments to date suggest that * multilateral * sanctions per Montreal, Basel etc. ** are ** permissable. If not, WTO would probably be forced to adopt the position. Further, per Montreal, wide scale adoption of a standard tends to put pressure on the scofflaws: India was a chloro scofflaw for a period, but international pressure made them back off.
(iii) increase in wealth tends to produce a shift in tastes (in the economic sense of the word, meaning desires/preferences) towards wishing to “consume” cleaner/better environment. Think of environment as a “superior good” for which demand increases with wealth. As such, internal pressures, esp. with outside “agitprop”, should help force both into compliance.
(iv) capacity. quite simply neither has full capacity to comply. better to increase their wealth to the point which they can afford longer term goals – medium term efficiencies are all good when one can afford to invest in them as the first world clearly can. India and China see more problematic issues. Further latter adoption after costs are reduced in re technology/method development will tend to make late entry of both more desirable.

Preciselyin re outside sensitivities.

I heartily agreed with the Economists’ strong suggestion that it would be better to renegotiate certain Kyoto detials and come up with a more market (and moving science) friendly framework as well as more realistic timeframes than to junk the thing.

Caveat: one should not try to compare domestic structures with international treaties. The game is far too different. Non-attainment insofar as it was a sticking point in negotiations was indeed a serious issue.

Otherwise, good comments.

And let me add once more, the sort of baseless discourse some have been in is quite simply embarrassing. There are rationale reasons to object to Kyoto and even differ over how and to what extent to address warming, however badly conceptualized conspiracy theories of the most illogical sort are not among them. I remain incredibly disappointed at the spreading of ignorance in this area.

In re Akat:
Global Cooling: I took and take this comment to be a throw away. In the context of your original message. I maintain it is an unworthy response. I know you can bloody well argue better than that.

Bush and Kyoto
Frankly Bush deserves the heat. The handling of the issue was a display of rank amateurism and stunning stupidity. I repeat, ** stunning stupidity**. I refer to the diplomatic aspect, not to the general issue of Kyoto. Since the administration’s position in re global warming is as of yet unknown I can’t tell if their substantive position is stupid or not. I agree with the Economist that it would be a stunning waste of time and prestige to entirely flush Kyoto down the toilet. Now, the shock value of forcing people back to the table to get movement on genuine issues is useful, if Bush et al are not flushing htings down the toilet. However it could have been handled much, much better.

Then, on the substance of the matter, I think on this message board one should reject the concept of arguing against a bad position with a bad position.

Rather, and I know you are capable of such, staking out a scientifically supportable critique of Kyoto and its mechanisms is the proper action. Not repeating the most baseless sort of conspiracy tripe. I think I have relatively effectively held the position that it is not a naitonal disgrace to wish to renegotiate Kyoto (or even abandon it for something new, whatever works) without any problem, but I leave that for others to decide.

36

Akatsukami replied to jshore: Thank you for the compliment. Actually, though, I have little more scientific training than you.

Hmmm, you have more scientific training than jshore’s PhD in physics and nine years of postdoctoral research in academia and industry? I’m kind of curious, Akatsukami: what are your credentials in terms of scientific training, exactly?

Despite the increasingly frantic attempts of the global warming industry to prove otherwise, the evidence is that global temperatures have been warmer than they are now in historical times.

This is a classic example of what seems to be a significant double standard in typical “global warming skeptic” discussions of anthropogenic GW. Skeptics like Akatsukami point to earlier major (non-anthropogenic) climate shifts that were even more drastic than the current GW predictions as evidence that climate change is really “no big deal”, so we shouldn’t make major policy changes in order to attempt to counteract the present trend.

In other words, climate change is okay because most of us will eventually survive and adapt to it. But changes in economic policy are not okay because they’ll impose burdens in the short term. Why the difference in standards of evaluation here? If you evaluate global climate change in terms of the short-term burdens it can impose, you’ll see that it can be much more economically catastrophic than the effects predicted for the Kyoto protocols, and in fact has been so in the past. The “Little Ice Age” in late medieval Europe destroyed viniculture in parts of France, Germany, and England, lowered tree lines and reduced habitability in mountainous regions, eliminated grain growing in Iceland, and caused mass migrations and war in Greenland. The economies of the affected regions took one hell of a hit.

Yes, humanity as a whole survived and adapted. And there is no question that global climate change will always be to some extent beyond human control, so we’ll always have to survive and adapt to it. But it will always cause our existing economic structures, which are generally founded on expectations of reasonable stability and continuity in things like geography and climate, to take a beating. So why shouldn’t we be willing to spend some money to reduce the aspects of climate change that are human-caused (if any are, and the overwhelming scientific consensus at present is that some are) and that we can do something about?

After all, humanity as a whole will survive and adapt to emissions controls too. I’m a little tired of emissions-reduction opponents airily assuming that the economic costs of pollution-related climate change are natural and inevitable but the economic costs of controlling pollution are intolerable and unacceptable. I rather suspect that this has more to do with the different distribution of the economic burden in the two cases than with the different size of the burden overall. (In fact, there’s substantial evidence to suggest that the overall burden of emissions reduction will be significantly smaller than the overall burden of emissions-related climate change, as jshore and others have noted.) The economic burdens of climate change are predicted to follow primarily on “natural” disasters—severe weather, epidemics, habitability loss, etc.—which bear hardest on individuals and which societies are therefore generally more willing to pay for with public money. The economic burdens of emissions reduction, on the other hand, do impact individuals (as in Tuckerfan’s example), but they’re also largely borne by industries responsible for the emissions.

And naturally, those industries are the ones yipping loudest about the intolerable burden of restrictions such as the Kyoto treaty. A new slogan for the global warming skeptics: “Polluters Save Now, Citizens Pay Later.”

(As for Captain Nemo’s petition, I note that its originator, Frederick Seitz (who is not an atmospheric scientist), has come under substantial and widespread scientific criticism for his biased and inadequately supported attacks on the IPCC. Read the critique here.)

37

I agree with kimstu and collounsbury that the Seitz petition pointed out by Capt. Nemo is more about politics than science. The fact that many signers have advanced degrees, some in scientific fields, does not make them experts on this particular issue. I have not been appealing to you to believe my position on global warming on the basis of my PhD in physics because, to be quite honest, although I have been reading some of the peer-reviewed scientific literature on global warming in order to get a flavor for the issues and such, I can’t claim that I am personally qualified to evaluate it. I leave that evaluation to the experts assembled by the IPCC and other organizations (National Academy of Sciences or AAAS assembled a panel not long ago…I’m not sure which) who have the expertise in this particular field.

By the way, I will note that there is a very good editorial on global warming and President Bush’s decision not to regulate CO2 written by editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy in this the March 30th issue of Science. While Kennedy’s own background is not climate science, the journal he serves as the editor of is one of the most highly-respected scientific journal’s in the world and has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles on climate change in the past year alone. He says in part: “By now the scientific consensus on global warming is so strong that it leaves little room for the defensive assertions that keep emerging from the cleverly labeled industrial consortium called the Global Climate Coalition and from a shrinking coterie of scientific skeptics…Consensus as strong as the one that has
developed around this topic is rare in science.”

Do you have any evidence that the executive summaries are written by “UN bureaucrats”? My impression was that they are written by the same scientists responsible for the writing of the report itself.

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Here’s a little more information that I found out about the history of the Seitz petition that was pointed out by Capt. Nemo:

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You miss my point. Given the talent for cosmic stupidity of our leaders their efforts to comply with the Kyoto treaty (were it to somehow be ratified) would force not the large, industrial manufacturers to clean up their act, no, it would be focused on the poor schmucks like myself who can’t afford to fix their car that happens to pump out more pollution than allowed by law. As for any benefits I may have seen from the process, there haven’t been many. Even with the emissions testing Nashville’s air is STILL too polluted. The next effort at reducing air pollution was to introduce gasoline formulated with MTBE, which DIDN’T clean up the air, but DID contaminate the water supply in many areas, so its being pulled off the market (even though tests the EPA and others had done BEFORE MTBE was foisted on the public proved that it was a health hazard and offered no benefits see Mother Jones Magazine for an article published in the mid-1990s for more information, sorry I don’t have a cite for this) It HAS turned out that one of the greatest sources for air pollution in THIS area are all the semi’s and diesel locomotives which currently AREN’T required to meet ANY emission standards at all. This was supposed to change, but knowing Bush and his infinite stupidity, that’ll probably get killed. I’d be all for automotive emissions testing if the state was willing to help those of us who can’t afford to fix our cars. That seems unlikely to happen, however. What IS likely to happen is that the state of Tennessee is going to jack my taxes up, which will make it even HARDER for me to save up the money to pay for the repairs to bring my car into compliance. Its a viscious cycle, guys, and I never seem to win it.

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No, in fact I did not. I just don’t see it having real validity.

Insults against our political leadership, however emotionally gratifying, are not a substitute for real anlaysis. Much as Montreal and most of our domestic environmental legistlation, most, was crafted in such a way as to end in gains in the aggregate, a well designed Kyoto protocol with the market oriented mechanisms which US negotiators had been pushing, would end up in ** aggregate ** gains for the US. Some people might lose out. You might be among those people. Tough, no policy, or even a lack of policy lacks negatives. The proper question is an accurate assessment of the costs and benefits and if there is an aggregate gain for a majority of the population. One can always compensate the losers.

In any case, I see no reason for the a priori assertion little guy loses big guys gain.

Causation. The proper question to ask is has the program mitigated increases? In other words, improvement when there has been an increase in economic activity which can be presumed to lead to greater emmissions may be measured in the reduction of increase.

I leave the rest of your various assertions aside.