Carol Ness reports on an earlier talk by David Roland-Holst:
Climate change: David Roland-Holst uses bubbles, big and small, on a chart to demonstrate a fundamental truth.... [E]nergy use against per capita income; the bubbles represent countries by population. Floating high on both axes are the medium-to-small bubbles of the United States and the rest of the industrialized world, rich countries that use a lot of energy. Hanging near the bottom are two giant bubbles, China and India, where both energy use and income are low — and rising. ARE economist David Roland-Holst's chart — which one of his graduate students calls his 'demonic bubble bath' — shows the tight relationship between energy use and prosperity, a key climate change issue. Based on World Bank and International Energy Agency data, the vertical axis plots per capita energy use in terajoules/year; the horizontal is per capita income as measured by the GDP. Bubble sizes represent population.
The relationship between income and energy use is no coincidence, and recognizing that simple fact is an essential part of getting past the current stalemate and finding answers to climate change.... Roland-Holst’s slides illuminated — from an economist’s point of view — China’s stand against limits on greenhouse-gas emission.... “[E]nergy is prosperity,” and economic growth is China’s top priority, asserted Roland-Holst. To maintain full employment, he said, China needs to generate 30 to 40 million new jobs every year. China’s power use will triple in the coming decades, mainly from coal-fired plants. And as China grows wealthier, car ownership will rise exponentially, from just 18 per 1,000 people today (in the U.S. the number is 800). The environment is a less immediate concern, he said. “We have to recognize it, we have to understand it, we need more experience in trying to devise cooperative solutions among very discordant interest groups, multinationally,” Roland-Holst said. “Until we do that, there will be deaf ears in the negotiations”...
And consider that India right now has twice and China four times the energy intensity of GDP of the United States...
Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis:
Arctic sea ice extent averaged over January 2011 was 13.55 million square kilometers (5.23 million square miles). This was the lowest January ice extent recorded since satellite records began in 1979. It was 50,000 square kilometers (19,300 square miles) below the record low of 13.60 million square kilometers (5.25 million square miles), set in 2006, and 1.27 million square kilometers (490,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.
Ice extent in January 2011 remained unusually low in Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait (between southern Baffin Island and Labrador), and Davis Strait (between Baffin Island and Greenland). Normally, these areas freeze over by late November, but this year Hudson Bay did not completely freeze over until mid-January. The Labrador Sea remains largely ice-free.
Alan S. Blinder: The Carbon Tax Miracle Cure: President Obama called for a major technological push for cleaner energy: "the Apollo projects of our time." But when the details emerge, it is predictable that his political foes will object to the new government spending and decry the "heavy hand" of government in telling business what to do. Fortunately, there is a marvelous way to square the circle... [leave] decision-making... in private hands... not cost taxpayers a dime... reduce the federal budget deficit... [also]like reducing our trade deficit, making our economy more efficient, ameliorating global warming.... What is this miraculous policy? It's called a carbon tax—really, a carbon dioxide tax—but one that starts at zero and ramps up gradually over time.
The timing is critical. With the recovery just starting—we hope—to gather steam, this is a terrible time to hit it with some big new tax. Hence, while the CO2 tax should be enacted now, it should be set at zero for 2011 and 2012. After that, it would ramp up gradually. Adapting some calculations from a recent paper by Prof. William Nordhaus of Yale, the tax might start at something like $8 per ton of CO2 in 2013 (that's roughly eight cents per gallon of gasoline), reach $25 a ton by 2015 (still just 26 cents per gallon), $40 by 2020, and keep on rising. I'd like to see it top out at more than $200 a ton in, say, 2040—which is higher than in Mr. Nordhaus's example.... What's critical is that we lock in higher future costs of carbon today. The key thing, as the president said, is that "businesses know there will be a market for what they're selling." Think about what would happen. Once America's entrepreneurs and corporate executives see lucrative opportunities from carbon-saving devices and technologies....
No one likes to pay higher taxes. But every realistic observer knows that closing our humongous federal budget deficit will require a mix of higher taxes and lower spending as shares of GDP. Forget about value-added taxes and other new levies you may have heard about. A CO2 tax trumps them all....
I know this sounds like a pipe dream now. America has elected a Republican House of Representatives that, among its first acts, decided that tax increases don't really add revenue and that tax cuts don't really lose revenue—at least not any revenue they are willing to count. These folks are not about to vote for a CO2 tax, even one starting at zero.
But let's remember Winston Churchill's marvelous aphorism: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they've tried everything else." First, we'll try everything else. But eventually we'll succumb to the inexorable logic of a phased-in CO2 tax. Just watch—if you're young enough to live that long.
Bad Climate for Global Warming: Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that 2010 had registered as the hottest year on record. Nothing new here: nine of the last 10 years have been among the warmest ever.
The news highlighted one of Washington's biggest failures over the last two years: its inability to advance climate legislation...
Now let's stop right now. The inability to advance climate legislation wasn't "Washington's" failure: it was a failure of Republican legislators, their tame hacks and propagandists, the carbon-energy lobby, and coal-state Democratic legislators.
Joshua Green knows who the culprits are as well as I do. But for some reason he does not believe he can say so in his lead.
Why not, Joshua? Why not?
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Here is the full piece:
Bad Climate for Global Warming - Joshua Green - Politics - The Atlantic: Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that 2010 had registered as the hottest year on record. Nothing new here: nine of the last 10 years have been among the warmest ever.
The news highlighted one of Washington's biggest failures over the last two years: its inability to advance climate legislation. It was also a grim reminder that things could get worse. Some crucial policy areas have always been neglected and some initiatives stalled. But rarely has a first-order concern like the nation's climate and energy policy actually regressed -- and so dramatically as we've seen since the last presidential election.
Not long ago, it appeared likely that the United States would take meaningful action to mitigate climate change. In the 2008 presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain touted plans to limit carbon emissions under a cap-and-trade scheme. Even Sarah Palin supported the idea. Much of the business community did, too. Adding momentum was the recent Supreme Court ruling, in Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency, that required the EPA, under the Clean Air Act, to regulate harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers, it was presumed, would take the matter into their own hands rather than cede that authority.
Of course, this didn't happen. Over the strenuous objections of Republicans and coal-state Democrats, the House of Representatives passed a cap-and trade bill in 2009 that met an ignominious death in the Senate. Along the way, cap-and-trade -- originally a conservative idea -- came to be vilified as "cap and tax'' and regarded by a substantial part of the conservative base as a form of fascist oppression. Today, fewer Americans believe in the reality of global warming than did so two years ago, and many took out their wrath last November on Democrats who'd supported a climate bill.
But this doesn't capture the full scale of the setback. Since that debacle, momentum in Congress has shifted strongly against climate-change legislation. If you want to frighten one of the remaining Democrats, suggest that he or she take another shot at passing cap-and-trade.
There's still the EPA. When both parties favored cap-and-trade, this option was viewed as the less desirable one. The agency could limit greenhouse gas emissions, but not through a system as flexible and efficient as cap-and-trade, which included simple improvements like building-efficiency standards that lay beyond the agency's remit. EPA regulations would thus be less effective.
The cap-and-trade bill that passed the House aimed to reduce emissions 17 percent by 2020 from their 2005 levels. A World Resources Institute study found that the most aggressive implementation of EPA regulations would only reduce emissions by 12 percent in that time frame. Scientists say reductions of 36-48 percent would be necessary to halt global warming. "Having EPA set carbon-pollution reductions was everyone's second choice for slowing global warming,'' said Daniel J. Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. "It was like 'In Case of Congressional Gridlock Break Glass.' ''
Now, the backup plan is the only plan, and "aggressive'' regulations are off the table. Last year, the EPA issued a "tailoring rule'' signaling how it intended to proceed. The results in no way resembled the fears expressed by many detractors that a burdensome new system of regulations would be imposed on small businesses. Instead, the EPA will confine its attentions strictly to the largest polluters, such as power plants, oil refineries, and chemical manufacturers.
These modest steps won't do nearly as much to slow global warming as the other, broader plans. But because the battle has shifted from the legislative to the regulatory front, the EPA nonetheless finds itself under attack from the newly empowered Republicans. One of the first things they will do is try to block EPA from establishing pollution standards, possibly by denying funds or refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless the process is slowed or halted.
It's not clear whether they'll succeed. But given the heightened importance of stronger restrictions, environmentalists can't feel good about recent developments. Earlier this week, the Obama administration said it would focus on eliminating regulations, rather than strengthening them. That's probably an accurate reading of the political climate. But for the planet's climate, it's yet another blow.
Stuff Happens: Stuff Happens
Joe Romm has some fun with the Texas Attorney General, who declares himself opposed to regulation of CO2 on the grounds that
It is almost the height of insanity of bureaucracy to have the EPA regulating something that is emitted by all living things.
As Joe points out, this argument says that we should adopt an equally laissez-faire attitude toward sewage.
But hey, there was a time when conservatives did, in fact, argue for doing nothing about effluent of any kind. In the years leading up to the Great Stink of 1858, which finally got the British to build a London sewer system, The Economist editorialized against any such foolish notion (pdf):
suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions—they cannot be got rid of.
Or, to put it (almost) in the modern vernacular, stuff happens.
And given the way we’re heading — with politicians arguing that the federal government has no right to ban child labor — don’t be surprised to see the anti-sewer movement making a comeback, and to see elected representatives, even if they know better, holding their noses and going along.
Is Obama’s EPA trying to implement ‘backdoor cap-and-trade’? Um, no: One conservative talking point that crops up with increasing frequency is that by using EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, Obama is effectively short-circuiting democracy, doing via regulatory fiat what Democrats could not accomplish via legislation. The Tea Party right is calling it "backdoor cap-and-trade." Similar sentiment is reaching even the more reasonable quarters of conservative thought -- James Joyner says it's a "unilateral decision arguably outside the scope of [the president's] Constitutional power" and Conor Friedersdorf cast it as "disregarding separation of powers."...
Just for the record, then, let's put the "backdoor cap-and-trade" myth to rest.
The EPA is under legal obligation to act
The Clean Air Act was passed in 1963. Here's what Section 202(a)(1) says:
[EPA] Administrator shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) ... standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
As you can see, the language of the statute is both broad ("any air pollutant") and unambiguous ("shall"). The EPA administrator is given broad latitude to make a judgment on whether a particular motor vehicle pollutant threatens public health; if it does, the administrator must "prescribe standards."... The law is intended... to apply to air pollutants that scientists in 1963 might not yet have been aware of. That is the law of the land. Yet it raises a question: Do greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act?...
This question was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided, in 2007's Massachusetts v. EPA, that yes, greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act....
If greenhouse gases are pollutants, the court said, then the EPA administrator must determine whether they endanger public health. In the case of greenhouse gases, conservative conspiracy theories aside, the only responsible answer to that question is in the affirmative, and that is what EPA scientists concluded in the agency's March 2009 "endangerment finding"... that means the EPA administrator "shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) ... standards" for them. She is bound to do so by law, and that is what Lisa Jackson is doing. Far from making a "unilateral" decision, she is acting in response to legal obligations imposed by Congress and the courts...
Putting EPA’s announcement on CO2 from power plants in context: A word on the EPA announcement today, since as usual most of what I read in the mainstream press is obscure or misleading. Also, everyone feels the need to quote History's Greatest Moron, James Inhofe. Why is that?
Today's announcement wasn't a huge deal -- it's just a timeline.... But the larger subject of greenhouse gas regs for existing pollution sources like power plants and oil refineries is a big deal.... EPA is proceeding on two separate tracks. The first track is a permitting program for new (or substantially upgraded) sources.... Today's announcement, by contrast, was about the second track, which will apply to existing sources.... [T]oday's announcement was just about two of the biggest: power plants and oil refineries, which together account for about 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. EPA didn't announce the standards themselves, but rather a timeline for when they will be announced and implemented.... Today's announcement means that a lot of existing sources that were "grandfathered" (i.e., exempted) under the original Clean Air Act -- in particular, dirty old coal plants -- are now going to have to clean up for the first time ever. That's a sea change.
Bottom line: This latest development is one more step in the march toward finally getting large existing sources of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants to clean up. But the real action will come next year, when the standards themselves are announced. Stay tuned!
NASA: Hottest November on record, 2010 likely hottest year on record globally — despite deepest solar minimum in a century « Climate Progress: NASA released its monthly global temperature data, revealing November was easily the hottest in the temperature record. The “meteorological year” — December to November — was also the hottest on record. Calendar year 2010 appears poised to be the hottest on record. These records are especially impressive because we’re in the middle of a strong La Niña, which would normally cool off temperatures for a few months (relatively speaking), and we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”
Joe Romm reviewed and trashed Matthew Kahn's (very good) book Climateopolis. Matthew asked a question:
Dear Joe,
Have you read my book or merely poked around the 6 pages that Amazon offers for free from the 288 page book? Have you read any of my work on climate change?
Joe answered:
Actually, Amazon offers some 70 full pages of the book for free -- and through the search feature you can find even more of the content. Frankly, the most illuminating part of the book are the notes, as I discuss. Your other work on climate change is not germane. I dare say one can read a much higher fraction of your book online than the fraction of relevant climate science literature you apparently have read. Have you read even a few of the relevant posts on this blog? Even this post and this one would get you to much of the key literature.
BP Investigation Released: The Oil Spill Was Everybody's Fault | TPMMuckraker: BP today released the report of its own investigation into what caused the Deepwater Horizon to explode and leak millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. We're still digging through the 193-page report, which you can find here, along with the appendices and executive summary. But according to BP's quick-summary press release, the company found that everyone involved had a hand in the disaster.
BP and Transocean were wrong when they thought well integrity tests showed the well was secure; Transocean's crew didn't react the right way when gas began flooding up the casing; the cement in the well, designed by Halliburton, failed; and the blowout preventer, manufactured by Cameron International, failed.
BP found itself absolved of accusations that its very design of the well caused the disaster.
"Based on the report, it would appear unlikely that the well design contributed to the incident," BP executive Tony Hayward said.
The Bellows » Innovation, and the Gas Tax: I’m not sure why anyone would argue that the imposition of a carbon price, even a relatively modest one, wouldn’t spur innovation. Price increases — the market’s signal for scarcity — lead to a range of human responses, among the most important of which is invention. The opinion that a price increase will likely lead to innovation is little more than a ratification of the idea that markets generally work. But Jim Manzi seems skeptical of this connection. And he cites variations in the gas tax rate as evidence:
Consider as an important example that most major Western European countries have had very high gas taxes – typically several dollars per gallon – for decades. But despite the efforts of lots of very smart engineers, the automobile has been a pretty stable technology for these same decades. Raising the price of gas does reduce consumption, and will of course induce some incremental innovation. But Western Europe seems to me to a big enough market so that if a low-carbon technology could be developed globally that was competitive with internal combustion in the face of a ~$5 per gallon gas tax, we already have a big enough end-use market to induce it. Why would increasing prices in America work when it hasn’t for Europe? There might be some carbon price that would radically accelerate innovation across the array of uses of fossil fuels (the limit case is simply outlawing coal and petroleum), but it has never, to my knowledge, been imposed anywhere at scale, presumably because it would impoverish any country that tried.
If you look closely, you’ll find that Manzi has gone and made the case for a carbon price in as compelling a fashion as you’re likely to find. Manzi thinks about automobiles and gas taxes and pictures a certain kind of innovation — new cars with new engines that don’t run on gas. And when he looks at Europe he doesn’t see it. But does that mean that there has been no innovation in response to the higher gas tax rates? Clearly that’s not the case. In general, Europeans do drive different automobiles, which tend to be smaller and more efficient. Some of these have been innovative enough in their design to generate raised eyebrows from American tourists (see: the Smart car). In Europe, the scooter is far more popular and differentiated (the scooter with roof is a common sight). Bicycles are also more common and differentiated, and the institutional supports for cyclists are more highly developed (cycle superhighways are old news in Europe).
And then there’s public transport....
And then, of course, there are innovations in the physical structure of the landscape....
And so on. The end result is that Europeans use a lot less gas, as Manzi acknowledges. But they don’t just reduce their consumption, as he intimates. They don’t lead lives exactly like ours, only they opt to sit at home while Americans go for Sunday drives. They have adapted and innovated their way around higher gas prices.
And the great breadth and variety of responses to higher rates is important to note. A country that sets its mind to innovating will approach problems with certain preconceived notions. They’ll say, “Well, we need to innovate our way around gasoline, so let’s see what new fuel we can find to replace it. Ethanol? Hydrogen? Electricity? We’re bound to hit on the right solution eventually.” But if you allow prices to do some of the work, you get many different solutions to the problem, many of which are far cheaper and more effective than the pre-conceived idea you had in mind. You get folks coming up with bike-sharing programs, car-sharing programs, and so on. You get effective innovation, which is exactly what we want. Manzi looks for the innovation he thinks he should see, and in the process he misses all the innovations that are actually there. And that’s precisely why the carbon price signal is so crucial.
They provide yet another set of reasons why it would be good for all of us if we were to dry it up and let it blow away right now:
Beware of Scorched-Earth Strategies in Climate Debates: [C]onservative Republicans... should resist demonizing market-based approaches to environmental protection and reverting to pre-1980s thinking that saddled business and consumers with needless costs.... [M]arket-based policies should be embraced, not condemned by Republicans.... Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency successfully put in place a cap-and-trade system to phase out leaded gasoline... at a savings of some $250 million per year.... George H. W. Bush... a cap-and-trade system to cut by half sulfur dioxide emissions... has cut sulfur dioxide emissions by 50 percent, and has saved electricity companies... some $1 billion per year compared with a conventional, non-market approach.... If some conservatives oppose energy or climate policies because of disagreement about the threat of climate change or the costs of those policies, so be it. But in the process of debating risks and costs, there should be no tarnishing of market-based policy instruments....
Conventional approaches advanced as “painless alternatives’’ — a plethora of standards, special-interest technology subsidies, and tax breaks — won’t do the job, and will be unnecessarily expensive.... A price on carbon is the least costly way to provide meaningful incentives for technology innovation and diffusion, reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and drive energy efficiency.... Demonizing cap-and-trade in the short term will turn out to be a mistake with serious long-term consequences...
Is there any respect--any respect--any respect at all in which the New York Times would not be a better publication if Ross Douthat were removed, and replaced by David Leonhardt?
I cannot think of any.
Here's David Leonhardt explaining why what the New York Times prints from Ross Douthat on its op-ed page is worse than tripe:
Armageddon Wars: I — like many others, I imagine — would be thrilled if [global cooling] were what the future held. But I think there are two big reasons to doubt that... The first is basic economics. When the problem is resource scarcity, companies and individuals have a powerful incentive to become more efficient. It keeps their costs down. Mr. Simon understood this, and it’s the fundamental reason he won the [resource price trend] bet [with Ehrlich]. But global warming is different. The fact that carbon emissions are warming the planet doesn’t make it more expensive to produce those emissions. So companies do not have an ever-increasing incentive to emit less — the way they would if the problem were, say, a lack of oil. Global warming doesn’t solve itself the way that resource scarcity does.
The second reason is the accumulation of evidence. Almost as soon as Mr. Ehrlich and Mr. Simon made their bet in 1980, Mr. Simon’s prediction started looking good.... In recent years, though, anyone who had bet against global warming would look as wrong as Mr. Ehrlich did. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are shrinking at an accelerating rate. Scientists have recently revised upwards their predictions of sea-level rises. The planet’s 10 hottest years on record, according to NASA, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008. This year is on pace to displace 2005 as No. 1.
The ultimate goal of climate legislation — be it the bill that the House passed last year or the bill that died in the Senate last week — is to align the incentives better, so human ingenuity can be harnessed to fight global warming. The bills would increase the cost of emitting carbon, thereby giving companies reason to emit less. Absent that, the best bet seems to be that emissions will keep rising and the planet will keep getting hotter.
Curious : It isn't something I follow closely generally, but I am a bit confused why the looming specter of EPA regulation hasn't melted some opposition to a decent climate/energy bill.
Exactly. If I were the energy industry or an energy-using industry, I would be absolutely desperately lobbying full-time for a cap-and-trade system rather than EPA-style regulation of carbon dioxide.
I suspect that the energy and energy-using industries are confident that the EPA will shy at the jump--that Obama doesn't want to get into a fight. But I don't see why they are so confident.
State of the Climate | Global Analysis | June 2010: The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2010 was the warmest on record at 16.2°C (61.1°F), which is 0.68°C (1.22°F) above the 20th century average of 15.5°C (59.9°F). The previous record for June was set in 2005. June 2010 was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record (March, April, and May 2010 were also the warmest on record). This was the 304th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below-average temperature was February 1985. The June worldwide averaged land surface temperature was 1.07°C (1.93°F) above the 20th century average of 13.3°C (55.9°F)—the warmest on record. It was the warmest April–June (three-month period) on record for the global land and ocean temperature and the land-only temperature. The three-month period was the second warmest for the world's oceans, behind 1998. It was the warmest June and April–June on record for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole and all land areas of the Northern Hemisphere. It was the warmest January–June on record for the global land and ocean temperature. The worldwide land on average had its second warmest January–June, behind 2007. The worldwide averaged ocean temperature was the second warmest January–June, behind 1998...
Economic Scene - Overcome by Heat and Inertia: This city just endured its hottest June since records began in 1872, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So did Miami. Atlanta suffered its second-hottest June, and Dallas had its third hottest. In New York, the weather was relatively pleasant: only the fourth-hottest June since 1872. Then again, New York is on pace for its hottest July on record. Yet when United States senators and their aides file into work on Wednesday, on yet another 90-degree day, they may be on the verge of deciding to do approximately nothing about global warming. The needed 60 votes don’t seem to be there, at least not at the moment.... [T]he odds of a major climate bill are not great. And if this White House and this Democratic Congress can’t pass one, you have to wonder what the future of climate policy looks like. All the while, the risks and costs of climate change grow. Sea levels are rising faster than scientists predicted just a few years ago. Himalayan glaciers are melting. In the American West, pine beetles (which struggle to survive the cold) are multiplying and killing trees.
According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.
Hot is the new normal.
The most efficient way to begin attacking the global swelter is no mystery. It involves raising the price of carbon emissions, which are warming the planet, and then letting the private sector find innovative ways to use less dirty energy. Conservative economists, like Gregory Mankiw, support this approach. So do liberals, like Joseph Stiglitz. But taxing carbon has never had much of a political chance. It’s too honest. It acknowledges that the best way to reduce the use of a product is to increase its price. We would all prefer a free lunch. So Congress has been laboring to disguise a price increase in a more palatable package.... Republican leaders, though, were only too happy to cast cap and trade as “cap and tax.”... The sad paradox is that cap and trade — which trusts in the efficiency of markets — was originally a Republican policy, signed by the first President Bush to reduce acid rain....
[T]he fuel economy rules from the 1970s that required car companies to make fewer gas guzzlers. The newly imposed scarcity of guzzlers, in turn, increased their price. But the relationship wasn’t obvious. Americans do not think of fuel economy rules as a tax on large vehicles. This explains why the rule-based approach seems to be the best bet for winning Republican votes. Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, has proposed new rules not just for vehicles but also for appliances, building codes and power plants. If these regulations were tough enough, they could make a difference, as the fuel economy rules have. So some Democrats and environmentalists see this approach as their best remaining chance.... On the other hand, such rules would require government regulators to make all kinds of decisions — about which dishwashers qualified as efficient, about which alternative energies power plants had to use and the like.... The result would almost certainly be higher, albeit better disguised, costs than with a carbon cap or tax.... Thus the opposition among other Democrats and environmentalists to accepting the Lugar approach as a compromise — and Mr. Reid’s difficulty in finding 60 votes for it....
Robert Stavins, the Harvard economist, told me he would actually prefer a bill that cut emissions less in the short term but created a template for much bigger cuts in the future. “Success, to me, would be the beginning of political acceptance of carbon pricing,” he said. I’ll confess to being torn about these arguments. A utility-only cap, even a flawed one, really would represent a whole different kind of progress than a souped-up version of fuel economy rules. A cap — any decent cap — remains the best benchmark of success. Yet if the Lugar approach were the only one that could pass, should we be so confident that it would put off further action? It’s not clear to me how another failure on energy policy will somehow make success more likely in the future.
All of this will be decided in the next few weeks, before the Senate breaks for its August recess, or in September, before the midterm election campaign takes over. Meanwhile, the temperature in Washington this week is supposed to hit 99.
Econbrowser: May Global Surface Mean Temp Anomalies: Business Week on record temperatures on the East Coast; AOL on global climate change and the probabilities of record-setting temperature episodes. See also Christian Science Monitor:
Indeed, 2010 is set to be one of the world’s hottest years on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the first five months of the year was the warmest on record, and 1.22 degrees F warmer than the 20th century average, the NOAA states in its May 2010 State of the Climate Global Analysis.
BP well leaking as much as 60K barrels/day: U.S. - MarketWatch: BP PLC's damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico is leaking between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels of oil a day, U.S. government and independent scientists said in an increased estimate Tuesday. The flow rate was previously estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day...
NASA: Easily the hottest spring — and Jan-May — in temperature record: Lmonth tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record.... The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is....
Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”... NASA’s recent draft paper reported: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”
For the record, it was the second hottest April in both satellite records (UAH and RSS), which are more sensitive to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) than the land records and have biases of their own (as Hansen discusses here). Although I’m sure it’s just another coincidence, but just as NOAA noted “North American snow cover for April 2010 was the smallest on record,” Rutgers University’s Global Snow Lab again reports a record low snow cover in the entire northern hemisphere for the month of May...
Via John Hempton: Subject: BP Related Agreement Entitlement
Dear Friend
I am the private solicitor for Mr Tony Hayward, the esteemed Chairman and Chief executive of British Petroleum. My client has various personal and family related holdings of BP stock and options. Due to his faithful long standing service to BP the total value of his holdings amounts to in excess of 100m pounds sterling. Mr Heywood is a British citizen but it has been my sorrowful duty to advise him that his personal and family wealth is at great risk of being wrongfully confiscated by US authorities acting extra-territorially under special powers authorised by the US government and with the secret consent of a supine UK political and legal establishment. Mr Heywood is also at great risk of losing his personal liberty and becoming another victim of the long reach of the politicised USA legal system. Unfortunately I am not able to advise or assist him in this regard as my expertise lies in the structuring of executive compensation schemes and the management of private endowments; but I am horrified at the witch hunt being perpetrated on my client by the Obama administration and its agencies and I will do all that I can to safeguard my client's financial position. I am reaching out to you as it has become clear that Mr Hayward's holdings must be liquidated and held in trust for the benefit of himself and his family. It has proven necessary to assign title to the ensuing 100m pounds of cash to a person such as yourself who resides in a non recognised tax haven country and where there is a sound basis for UK and USA authorities to recognise the legal validity of local agreements. The taxation and legal recognition agreements between your jurisdiction of Australia and those of UK and USA present a unique opportunity to protect these assets whilst providing you with a benefit in accordance with your key role. I am a keen reader of your blog and greatly admire your economic and political acumen. I immediately recognised that, at this hour of great urgency and risk to my client, you are the man who is capable of securing protection of the Hayward estate...
Relief-Well Plan Was Used in Worst Blowout Ever, Took 9 Months: The worst blowout on record took about nine months to cap using two relief wells.... In 1979, Ixtoc-1, an exploratory well owned by Petroleos Mexicanos in 150 feet of water, blew out 600 miles (966 kilometers) south of Texas in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche and spilled an estimated 3.3 million barrels into the Gulf, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Petroleum Institute.... The oil and natural gas blowing out of Ixtoc-1 ignited, causing the platform to catch fire.... Two wells were drilled to relieve pressure from Ixtoc-1 so that it could be capped, according to NOAA....
The differences between the two spills are more worrisome than the similarities, said Boehm, who is now principal scientist at Exponent.... The oil from Ixtoc-1 took two months to be transported, which changed the composition of the crude and made it less toxic, Boehm said. The length of time allowed U.S. responders to prepare for the spill. The composition of the oil from the BP well will be different, Boehm said. “The oil has been out there eight days now,” he said. “The more it weathers, the less toxic it is.”
About 71,500 barrels of oil from Ixtoc-1 affected 162 miles of U.S. beaches and more than 10,000 cubic yards of oiled material were removed, according to the Industry Technical Advisory Committee, a U.K.-based oil-spill organization of technical experts. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service used volunteers for handling oiled birds and beach patrols on South Padre Island. “This will be a lot worse,” said Miles Hayes, a coastal geologist with Research Planning Inc. in Columbia, South Carolina, who studied the Ixtoc-1 spill. The oil from the Ixtoc-1 spill hit the 90-miles of Texas barrier islands, protecting the environmentally fragile marsh lands from the spill, Hayes said in a phone interview. “You want to keep the oil from getting past the barrier islands,” Hayes said. “After Ixtoc, in Texas it wasn’t too tough because we had only three inlets. Louisiana is a different scenario.”
Deepwater Horizon is currently at perhaps a quarter of Ixtoc-1...
Umm... This ain't rocket science. This really ain't rocket science at all...
Benjamin Wallace-Wells:
Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us: In OIRA’s cost-benefit calculations, the government’s willingness to spend depends on how expensive the damage will be — on what economists call the social cost of carbon. Sunstein and others in the government have spent several months trying to define this cost, and he talked me through the process. One of the most important issues is the discount rate — the depreciation of money over time. All else being equal, if given a choice between paying $1 million now and $1 million five years from now, economists will choose to pay later. After all, if money depreciates at say, 3 percent a year, then spending $1 million today is the equivalent of spending only about $860,000 of today’s dollars five years from now. Over very long periods, like those involved in climate change, the discount rates that are applied to short-term problems like budgets build toward absurdity: using one common method, spending $1 million today to forestall climate change would be the equivalent of spending $2,300 in 2100. Calculations like this seem to argue against doing anything now. The problem, Sunstein says, is that we might do irreversible damage to the planet while blithely waiting for the price of action to drop just enough.... As an academic, Sunstein seemed to side with economists like William Nordhaus at Yale, who set the discount rate at about 5 percent, which would counsel patience. “It’s not clear what direction the risk of error cuts in,” he told me. “If we err, 7 percent could be bad,” he said, but “if we err, 1 percent could be bad also.” A low a discount rate might protect the environment by spurring us to sacrifice now — while damaging the economy, increasing poverty and putting more people out of work. The difficulty is that the experts are lined up “out the door and down the block on both sides of this issue,” one economist told me...
Here we have yet another example of why law professors should simply not be allowed to practice law and economics or moral philosophy without a license--and of how Cass Sunstein has never bothered to do the work necessary to acquire a license to practice law and economics.
First, "irreversible damage": we are doing irreversible damage to the environment every day in that every day human activity brings more species closer to extinction, and natural or artificial selection would never be able to resurrect them no matter how much money we would spend trying to do so. The question that must be asked: is how much we care--how damaging is the "irreversible damage," and what other goods are we willing to forego in order to avoid it? What Sunstein implies--that "irreversible damage" is something that must be avoided and that trumps cost-benefit calculations--is simply incoherent, and does nothing other than perform the function of getting him onto Obama administration message without admitting that he does not understand why the cost-benefit analysis tools he loves so much are leading him to what is for an Obama administration official an off-message conclusion.
Second, the cost-benefit analysis tools Cass Sunstein loves so much are leading him to an off-message conclusion only because Sunstein does not understand how to use them. Nick Stern's Climate Change Report uses the same tools and leads to a very different conclusion than "argu[ing] against doing anything now." The shortcut way to understand why is that there are actually three discount rates to be used in cost-benefit analysis here--(i) a nominal interest discount rate to be used for money values, (ii) a real interest discount rate to be used for real values, and (iii) a human discount rate to be used for human lives and their quality. (Plus there are risk adjustments that I won't go into here.) We tend to read the money-discount and the real-discount rates off of the market yields on long-term Treasury bonds and on long-term TIPS. But neither is appropriate if what is at stake is human lives and their quality--then something more like the TIPS yield minus the expected rate of growth of labor productivity is appropriate.
At the moment the real TIPS yield is 1.79% per year. The expected labor productivity growth rate is something north of 1.6% per year. That calls for a human-lives-and-their-quality discount rate, to be applied to global warming expenditures now, of 0.19% per year AT MOST.
Wallace-Wells's and Sunstein's 3% per year discount rate would be the right one if the human, life, and welfare cost of a given tragedy were the same in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2100 as it is today--if the amount of real value we would wish to spend to avoid a chance of 10,000,000 Bengalis drowning in 2110 would be the same as the real value we would spend to avoid a chance of 10,000,000 Bengalis drowning in the next hurricane season. But it won't be: we expect technology to progress over the next ninety years, and thus for us to be capable of and want to and be willing to spend much more money to guard against human catastrophes a century hence. Today we have 6 billion people on the world with income per capita of $7,000 a year. In 2110 we expect to have 9 billion people on the world with income per capita of $56,000 per year. Thus we expect that inasmuch as they will be richer than we are that they will value human lives and high quality lives more highly in real values and be willing to spend more to preserve and enhance them than we are.
To argue that they will not be--that avoiding a 1% chance of 10,000,000 drowned Bangalis will be worth spending no more in real value on in 2110 than it is today--is to be a moral monster.
Or a cost-benefit analyst who does not understand how to use his tools.
Science and Tech: W]hen it comes to government disaster response, the Bush years marked a low point and right now we're experiencing a high point. For a vivid illustration of this disparity, look no further than the Gulf. During Katrina, FEMA director Michael Brown secured his place history as the poster boy for government incompetence. Now consider Chu, the Nobel Prize Winner who has been at BP headquarters in Houston with a team of government scientists.... I talked to Chu this afternoon about the government's response to the disaster. As a mental exercise, try and imagine what these answers would sound like if "Brownie" or some other top Bush officials were still overseeing disaster relief in the Gulf.
JG: I understand you just got back from Houston? What were you doing there?
SC: We went there Tuesday night, we were in Houston in the morning with BP, then visited for three or four hours with the manufacturers of the blowout preventers [the equipment that should have stopped the leak].... I was talking about a week and a half ago to some of the Department of Energy folks... There was a several hour phone call Sunday where a few of the national lab directors, I, and the people we had at the site were talking about what we can do to help BP, and we thought that we could perhaps help them specifically by imaging the state of the BOP, the blow-out-prevention valve, with high-energy gamma rays.... BP... seem to be very open to having brainstorming sessions.... The idea was to bring in very smart people who also have great connections to the larger engineering and scientific community. The national lab director who's been engaged in this from the beginning, Tom Hunter, and I and four other scientists and engineers went down there.
JG: How is it that you know enough about gamma rays and oil spill technology to be helpful? I wasn't aware that that was an area you'd worked in before you were secretary?
SC: Oil spills were not something I've worked on, but I do know about gamma rays.... I'm a physicist. And I dabble.... I kept in my brain certain nuclear sources and what their energies were and I knew what the ranges were for how penetrating gamma rays could be. Very high-energy gamma rays can penetrate several inches of steel.
JG: And that's the challenge at the bottom of the ocean? To penetrate the steel and see the condition of the equipment?
SC: Yeah. Think of a dental X-ray. You have the source that can penetrate through material and you expose something on the backside. If you want to go through not flesh, but steel of a very high density, you need higher energy, electromagnetic particles--the higher the energy, the more penetrating it can be without being scattered or absorbed.... To the extent BP wants it, we can give advice on how to think through these things. What you're doing in a situation like this is dealing with probabilities--you don't know the exact state of something. For example, in the final hours we were saying, "Well, what if this thing happened?" There's a small probability, but if it does happen, what do you do? And if this other thing happens what do you do? You're chasing down answer about what to do should something unforeseen happen, even though it might be a very small possibility. You still want to go down those paths. Instead of approaching it as, "Oops, this happened--now what do we do?"... [Y]ou want a set of fresh eyes, people who can propose potential out-of-the-box solutions, who might foresee what might go wrong. If you're an expert and you're used to certain things done certain ways, that limits your ability to cast a wider net, and so one of the most important things that we're doing at the national laboratories is putting together these scientific teams, many of whom would be considered non-experts. In times like this, those are many of the people you want. BP and the oil industry have the lion's share of the experts that are exactly germane to this. So this is how we think we can best add value.... [W]e know more about the blowout preventer, we know more about its condition, there are things on it that have worked. So I think there's a path forward. But as everyone knows, it ain't over till it's over, to quote the great American philosopher of the 20th century. And meanwhile oil is continuing to spill. So we are very focused on trying to stop that as quickly as possible. And the government is also focused on the downstream things to mitigate its environmental impact...
Global Warming Panic Attack - The Week: Media personalities and Freakonomicists claim that the planet has recently experienced global cooling. But according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, we have just experienced the hottest twelve-month period in at least a thousand years.
If global temperatures continue rising at the rate they have risen for the past generation, then the world of 2100 will be 2.3 degrees Celsius – that’s 4.1 degrees Farenheit -- hotter than the world of the 1970s. If global warming accelerates, however, as industrializing China, India and other countries pour more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and as Indonesia, Brazil, and others cut and burn their forests, the world in 2100 will be 5 Celsius -- 9 Farenheit -- degrees hotter than the world of the 1970s.
In a more hopeful vein, if we are lucky, we might discover powerful carbon-sink processes that absorb carbon dioxide or reflective-cooling technology that reduces warming. Or we might discover magical new non-greenhouse-gas emitting technologies that can be deployed more cheaply than current carbon-based technologies. In any of these scenarios, we may wind up with a world in 2100 that is little warmer than the world of the 1970s. At least we can hope.
But hope is not a plan. The world was supposed to plan at Kyoto. It did not. Subsequently, it was supposed to plan at Copenhagen. Again it did not.
So right now I am panicking. And in my panicked state, I become shrill and unrealistic. So I am calling for four actions--at least one of which, in particular, is robustly unappealing.
Beg the rulers of China and India to properly understand their long-term interests;
Nationalize the energy industry in the United States;
Pour money into research on closed-carbon and non-carbon energy technologies in order to maximize the chance that we will get lucky on energy technologies if not on climate sensitivity.
Restrict future climate negotiations to a group of seven -- the U.S., the E.U., Japan, China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil -- and enforce agreement by substantial and painful trade sanctions on countries that do not accept the demands of the resulting negotiated system.
In a later column, I will address points (3) and (4). Meantime, let me just talk about (1) and (2).
First, I want us to beg the rulers of China and India to understand their own situation. Unless the North Atlantic Conveyor shuts down and Europe returns to the climate of the Younger Dryas Era (the big freeze of more than 10,000 years ago), global warming will not be hugely problematic for the North Atlantic economies -- at least not for a century. We’ll mourn the loss of our glaciers and snow packs. We’ll lament the extinction of polar bears, the coral reefs, and the giant sequoias. But we’ll welcome extra sunny days to go to the beach. We’ll move a few miles north, relocate economic activity to get out of the paths of hurricanes and droughts, turn down our heaters, turn up our air conditioners, and live our lives. It would be expensive for us to adapt to warming -- more expensive, I believe, than dealing with the problem -- but we could do so.
But China, India and their neighbors in the great river valleys of Asia will soon be home to three billion farming peasants. These farmers depend on the regular monsoon rains and the river flows of the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow Rivers. Global warming means their climate will change. There will either be much more precipitation in the valleys feeding the rivers, or much less. If there is much less, hundreds of millions will face drought and famine. If there is much more, millions will likely die in floods and the dwelling and working places of hundreds of millions will be washed away. Unlike North Americans, Asia’s peasant-farming populations are not rich enough simply to adapt.
So we need to beg the rulers of China and India to understand their long-term interests. The welfare of their countries over the next four generations depends on gaining rapid control of global warming. Their own personal survival — unless they want mobs descending on their homes, dragging them and their descendants into the streets — depends on it. And because either China or India is going to be the globe’s dominant superpower in a century, even if they are clobbered by climate change, pleasing that future superpower now is in every country’s interest. So we need to beg the rulers of China and India to recognize their own long-term interest, and to help us get this climate-control party started.
Allow me to make the first entreaty. Rulers of China and India: I beg you. Get on board. Please.
Second, I want us to nationalize the open-carbon-cycle energy industry in the United States.
In the 1960s it became clear that the price of oil in the United States should be higher. Because of powerful congestion and pollution externalities, we were over-investing in the automobile civilization. A larger tax on oil would have nudged the economy closer to the social optimum.
In the 1970s it became very clear that the price of oil in the United States needed to be even higher. Because of instability in the Middle East, our dependence on that region as a major source of energy created unacceptable geopolitical risks. A larger tax on oil would have nudged the economy into a new configuration, mitigating the danger.
At the start of the 1990s it became painfully clear that the price of carbon energy needed to be higher: the global warming threat was upon us. Yet the price increase never materialized. It never happened because of what the inner circle around my ex-boss, former Texas Senator and U.S. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, used to call the “ullengaz” industry – “oil and gas.” This potent industry has blocked desirable public policy regulation for nearly fifty years now.
In general, I am opposed to state-run, nationalized industries: managing industry is without a doubt the private sector’s role, not the government’s. As a neoclassical economist, I risk having my union card revoked when I advocate government ownership of what otherwise could be a profit-making private enterprise.
But the interaction of rent-seeking industry with a flawed political system has made me willing to make an exception in the case of America’s carbon-based energy industry. True, government ownership will increase inefficiency and the misallocation of resources. But it will also increase political efficiency, since the energy industry will no longer be able to purchase Members of Congress and use them to strangle the policy innovations needed to advance the national interest. So nationalize the carbon energy sector -- not to expropriate wealth or to penalize shareholders, but to remove a selfish and destructive political force that threatens our future.
Radical proposals? Yes.
Indeed, you may think they are shrill, impractical, and utopian proposals. (I, also think they are shrill, impractical, and utopian proposals.) You may think we should instead continue down the energy and environmental policy path we have traveled so many times before, meeting the same legislative roadblocks. You may think that we should simply try again, and hope that this time it turns out differently.
According to the NASA data, we have just experienced the hottest 12-month period in more than 100 years, which means that the past 12 months have been the hottest in at least the past 1,000 years.
What does this mean? Well, if global temperatures continue to rise at the rate that they have risen for the past generation, then the world of 2100 will see a world 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the world of the 1970s. New York will get the climate of Washington. Los Angeles will get the climate of Tijuana.
But global warming might accelerate, especially if China, India and other industrializing powers continue to increase the amount of carbon dioxide they pour out. Perhaps the world by 2100 will be 9 degrees hotter than the world of the 1970s. That would give Washington the climate of Miami and Los Angeles the climate of Cabo San Lucas.
And we might get lucky. We might learn that the climate is in fact immensely stable on the upside. Even though past ice ages have ended quickly with very rapid warming, perhaps there are factors in the Earth's biosphere that allow it to soak up excess carbon dioxide quickly, like a sponge, and perhaps the world of 2100 will not be much warmer than the world of today. Or perhaps we will discover magical new energy technologies that are actually cheaper than our current technologies and will be rapidly adopted without the governments of the world lifting a finger to take action.
But that is not the prudent way to bet. The prudent thing to do is to plan, and to hedge: to plan for the most likely case, and to hedge by taking precautions — insurance — against the worst case. The world was supposed to plan how to deal with our global warming future at Kyoto. And then the world was supposed to plan for how to deal with our global warming future at Copenhagen. It did not do so.
So what do we do now?
Let us start with our global institutions. It is a fact that global warming is not likely to be a total human catastrophe here in California during the next 100 years. We will mourn the losses of our glaciers and our snowpack. We will lament the extinction of the polar bear, the coral reefs and the giant sequoias. We will be distressed at the transformation of California's Central Valley into the north Mojave Desert. But many San Franciscans really won't mind having the climate of Los Angeles. And many Angelenos will not be greatly distressed to have the climate of Tijuana. We will probably move a few miles north and relocate economic activity to get out of the paths of hurricanes and droughts. We will turn down our heaters and turn up our air conditioners. We will live our lives. It will be expensive for us to simply adapt, and it would be cheaper over the next century to deal with the problem. But here in California, there's little question we will be able to adapt without immediate human catastrophe for the next century.
That's not the case for Asia. China, India and their neighbors will soon have 3 billion peasants farming in the great river valleys of Asia. They depend on regular monsoon rains in the valleys and water flows down the channels of the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers. Global climate change means that there will either be more precipitation in the valleys and feeding the rivers — or much less. If there is more, millions will die in floods, and the dwelling and working places of hundreds of millions will simply be washed away. The 3 billion are not rich enough to abandon their land and move away. They are also not rich enough to protect themselves. If there is much less water, hundreds of millions will die in famine and drought. Again, the peasant farming populations of Asia are not rich enough to abandon their land and move away. And they are also not rich enough to bring icebergs up from the Antarctic and pipe the water uphill from the sea to their farms.
The peasant farming populations are not rich enough to simply adapt. So the first thing we need to do is to beg the rulers of China and India to understand their nations' long-term interest.
But even if China and India understand and join the North Atlantic and the island nations of the Pacific in understanding the immensity of the long-run problem, that will not be enough. In the current international forum, China and India are simply two out of a 150 nations, and consensus is required. That is just too big a body with too many conflicting interests.
So the second thing we need to do is change the forum. We need a climate council made up of the seven governments that have the biggest power to influence the climate and the most at stake: the United States and the European Union, along with Japan, China, India, Indonesia and Brazil. Once the council has agreed to a treaty, it should be enorced by using aggressive and substantial trade sanctions against outsider countries that do not want to come up to the mark.
Utopian? Yes. Impractical? Probably. But what is the practical and realistic alternative that it would be better to push for?
AFTER COPENHAGEN: What Can Be Done to Meet the Economic and Environmental Challenges?
4 p.m., Goldman Theater, David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way at Fulton St., Westside of UCB Campus, Berkeley, CA 94704
The Peder Sather Symposium represents an ongoing collaboration between the governments of Norway and Sweden and UC Berkeley. The goal of the symposium is to promote the understanding of political, economic, and cultural issues. The event is designed to foster interdisciplinary discussion among scholars and policymakers from Europe and the U.S. on global and national issues of mutual concern.
About Peder Sather: Peder Sather was born in Norway in 1810. He emigrated to New York and then to California, where he founded the banking firm of Sather and Church. Peder Sather was one of the early trustees of the College of California and an active participant in aiding the institution that has become the University of California. Upon his death, the Sather and Church banking firm was absorbed by the Bank of California. Although it was Peder Sather who had accumulated the wealth and resources that helped fund education in California, it was the work of his wife, Jane Krom Sather, a native of New York State, who made the Sather name part of UC Berkeley's history. Through her generous endowments to the University's teaching resources and beautification effort (notably Sather Gate, which was the main entrance to the UC campus), the Sather name has come to symbolize a legacy of collaboration between Norway and the University of California. With the Sather legacy in mind, the University of California and the Royal Norwegian Consulate General of San Francisco inaugurated the first Peder Sather Symposium in 1991.
After Copenhagen, What?
J. Bradford DeLong
Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley
Research Associate, NBER
April 15, 2010
We have just experienced the hottest twelve-month period in at least the past thousand years.
Media personalities and freakeconomists claim that in recent years there has been global cooling. They lie.
If global temperatures continue to rise at the rate that they have risen for the past generation, then the world of 2100 will see a world 2.3C—4.1F—hotter than the world of the 1970s. If global warming accelerates, as industrializing China, India, and other countries pour more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and as Indonesia, Brazil, and other countries cut and burn their forests. We are looking at a world that by 2100 will be 5C—9F—hotter than the world of the 1970s. If we are lucky, we might discover that there are powerful carbon-sink processes and reflective cooling processes that have not yet swung into action, and we might discover magical new non-greenhouse gas emitting technologies that can be deployed more cheaply than our current open carbon-cycle technologies, and we might wind up with a world in 2100 that is little warmer than the world of the 1970s. We can hope.
But hope is not a plan. We can hope. We should also plan.
The world was supposed to plan at Kyoto, and then again at Copenhagen. It did not.
So what do we do now? I think we should do four things:
Pour money like water into research into closed-carbon and non-carbon energy technologies in order to maximize the chance that we will get lucky—on energy technologies at least, if not on climate sensitivity.
Beg the rulers of China and India to properly understand their long-term interests
Nationalize the energy industry in the United States.
Restrict future climate negotiations to a group of seven—the U.S., the E.U., Japan, China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil—and enforce their agreement by substantial and painful trade sanctions on countries that do not accept their place in the resulting negotiated system.
Let me briefly outline the reasons for these four things we should be doing:
Research. Into closed-carbon energy technologies, into non-carbon energy technologies, into geoengineering. It would be really nice to find a technological magic bullet. It would mean that all kinds of painful and difficult political negotations would not have to be carried through and we could devote the energy to all kinds of things. And it would mean that all kinds of investments economizing on energy use would no longer have to be carried through and we could spend the wealth on other things. Plus it would be cool to watch the gigantic 8000-mile in diameter sunshade being moved into its position at the appropriate Lagrange point for the Earth’s orbit. And it would be fun to watch the giant cannons throwing dust into the atmosphere—and to watch the beautiful sunsets that would result (if such a world would not be a Blade Runner-esque world in which our oceans were turning into acid soda water).
Beg the Rulers of China and India. Unless the North Atlantic Conveyor shuts down and Europe returns to the climate of the Younger Dryas Era, global warming is not a huge deal for the North Atlantic economies for a century. We mourn the losses of our glaciers and our snowpacks. We lament the extinction of the polar bears, the coral reefs, and the giant sequoias. We welcome the extra sunny days to go to the beach. We move a few miles north, relocate economic activity to get out of the paths of hurricanes and droughts, turn down our heaters, turn up our air conditioners, and live our lives. It would be expensive for us to simply adapt—more expensive I believe than dealing with the problem—but we could do so.
But China and India will soon have, along with their neighbors, three billion farming peasants in the great river valleys of Asia. They depend on the regular monsoon rains and the river flows of the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow Rivers. Global warming means the climate will change. There will either be much more precipitation in the valleys and feeding the rivers, or much less. If there is much less, hundreds of millions will die in famine and drought. If there is much more, millions will die in floods and the dwelling and working places of hundreds of millions will be washed away. The peasant-farming populations are not rich enough to simply adapt.
So we need to beg the rulers of China and India to understand their long-term interest: The welfare of their countries over the next four generations depends on rapidly controlling global warming. Their own personal survival—unless they want mobs descending on their homes when they are in retirement, dragging them and their descendants out into the street, and carrying their heads on pikes—depends on rapidly controlling global warming. And because one of either China or India is going to be the globe’s dominant superpower in a century, pleasing that future superpower now is in every country’s interest. So we need to beg the rulers of China and India to recognize their personal and their countries’ long-term interest, and to use their power as future global superpowers to help us get this climate-control party started.
I hereby do so. Rulers of China and India: I beg you. Get on board. Please.
Nationalize the American Energy Industry. In the 1960s it became very clear that the price of oil in the United States needed to be higher: Because of powerful congestion and pollution externalities, we were overinvesting in the automobile civilization. A larger tax on oil would nudge the economy closer to the social optimum. In the 1970s it became very clear that the price of oil in the United States needed to be even higher: Because of instability in the Middle East, unacceptable geopolitical risks were being generated by our dependence on the Middle East as a source of energy. A larger tax on oil would nudge the economy into a configuration in which this geopolitical danger would be lessened. And at the start of the 1990s it became very clear that the price of carbon energy needed to be higher: global warming.
Yet it never happened. It never happened because of what Lloyd Bentsen’s aides used to call the “ullengaz” industry—“oil and gas.” Powerful enough to block desirable public policy regulation and adjustment for nearly fifty years now. In general I am opposed to state-run nationalized industries: that is definitely the private sector’s place, not the government. But the interaction of rent-seeking politics with the flaws of America’s political system have made me willing to make an exception in the case of America’s oil industry: the increased allocative inefficiency that will flow from government ownership and management is, in my judgement, likely to be much less than the increased political efficiency that will flow from no longer having the energy industry able to purchase enough Representatives and Senators to block needed policy moves that it fears will be adverse to its interests. So nationalize—not to expropriate or to penalize the shareholders, but to get this particular selfish and destructive political voice out of American governance.
Restrict Future Climate Negotiations to a Group of Seven. When the United Nations was founded, key decision-making power was restricted to a group of five important countries that had been the victorious allies of World War II: The U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China—those are the five Security Council veto powers. One of the things that Copenhagen has, I think, demonstrated is that climate-control negotiations are too complex and too fraught for them to be successfully achieved via grand multilateral processes. So allow everybody to kibbitz. But require only the agreement of a Climate Council of Seven in order to implement a treaty. And let those seven be the seven who have the biggest power to influence the climate and the most at stake: U.S., the E.U., Japan, China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Then enforce the treaty by using aggressive and substantial trade sanctions against outsider countries that do not want to live up to their responsibilities according to whatever plan is negotated by the Climate Council of Seven.
You may think—and you may even say—that these four proposals of mine are all unattainable and radical. You may think—and you may even say—that we should continue to walk down the road we have been walking, even though every time we do we seem to run into and bruise our noses against the same stone wall. We should, you may think, try again to walk the same road, and hope that this time it turns out differently.
The year it didn't happen - Winnipeg Free Press: France became the largest economy to impose a carbon tax on individuals and businesses using coal, gas or oil, with the explicit intention of changing people's patterns of energy use. The tax is US$24 per tonne of emissions now, but it will rise over the years...
This is something that I should have been told when it happened, nu?
Fifteen years ago... no, thirty years ago... no, forty years ago we should have impose a carbon tax. Pollution externalities and the national security externalities of relying on and paying people in an unstable and undemocratic part of the world to be the key energy link on our economy both strongly militated for conservation and alternative energy--and a carbon tax was the best way to do that.
Twenty years ago with the recognition of human carbon-emission caused greenhouse gas global warming, a third decisive reason was added to the case for a carbon tax.
Yet here we are now, without one. And many of those who believe in a carbon tax argue that our absence of one now is not that big a deal--that ideally we would start with a low carbon tax now and gradually ramp it up over the next generation or two:
Paul Krugman tries to understand the issues:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/toyclimate.pdf Nordhaus and other [ramp-up-gradually] modelers, making their best possible estimates, come to the conclusion that while emissions must eventually be brought way down and carbon concentration stabilized, it’s not worth doing this until K has risen a long way above current levels. So it’s a mega-St. Augustine: "O Lord, make us carbon-neutral, but not yet."... [W]... [have] a long way to go up the saddle path, and hence a low carbon price is appropriate now. This is the “climate policy ramp”.... [I]n Figure 1... [because] there doesn’t seem to be much disagreement about the economic costs of carbon abatement... it’s about dλ/dt=0. Now, it’s obvious if we’ve gotten this far that there are two ways to argue that this locus should be set higher, and hence imply a lower long-run level of atmospheric carbon: you can either increase the numerator in equation (3) or reduce the denominator.
What Nicholas Stern did was reduce the denominator, arguing that we should use a much lower discount rate than the private sector appears to. I’m still wrapping my head around what I believe about that. But what about the numerator? This... [is] the sensitivity of temperatures to carbon concentration... [times] the sensitivity of [social] welfare to temperature.... Lately, climate models have begun suggesting a lot more sensitivity to concentration, with a number of groups doubling their predicted temperature rise.... Marty Weitzman has managed to scare me, by pointing out that there’s a pretty plausible case that a rise of 5 degrees C – which is no longer an outlandish prediction – would be utterly catastrophic. You don’t have to be sure about this; just a significant probability is enough...
I think Krugman goes astray when he characterizes Stern. Nick Stern assumes something different than a "low discount rate." He assumes:
No pure time preference--that the welfare of somebody born in 2100 does not count less than the welfare of somebody born in 1960 simply by virtue of birth date.
The costs of global warming scale with the economy: double the size of the economy and you double the costs of global warming.
Stern's first assumption seems to me to be trivially and obviously correct as a proposition in utilitarian or, indeed, any other view on moral philosophy.
Stern's second assumption is debateable: if you thought that the costs of global warming rose not with the size of the economy but with the square root of the size of the economy, then all of a sudden the r in equation (3) would be much, much bigger.
I have long thought that the fact that there have been a bunch of ice ages recently when the world was significantly colder than it is now is evidence that there are powerful multiplier mechanisms in our climate on the downward side: as I think I understand it, small solar forcings produced by the evolution of the earth's orbit are powerfully amplified by changes in albedo and thus produce much larger swings in temperature. I had, however, thought that this was not true on the upside: that the absence of recent episodes in which the earth was a bunch warmer than it is now tells us that positive-feedback multiplier amplification on the warming side is limited.
There is growing evidence that I am wrong.
Matthew Yglesias tells us to go read:
Matthew Yglesias: Arctic Seabed Methane Stores Destabilizing: It’s a good thing this is all part of some giant conspiracy, because if I thought scientists at the University of Alaska were undertaking good-faith scientific research I’d be really worried about this:
A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov. The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
But there was a freakishly large amount of snow in DC earlier this year! Meanwhile, climate science deniers are now teaming up with creationists to mount a broad political front against accurate understanding of the world.
Physorg.com:
Study: Arctic seabed methane stores destabilizing, venting: University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov... published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming. “The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.” Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material—which contains carbon—stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under oxygen-free conditions, gradually release methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source: 7 teragrams yearly, which is equal to the amount of methane emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons. “Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”
Shakhova notes that Earth’s geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the planet warms and sea levels rise, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature. “It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.” Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov’s work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice...
Hell, a BTU tax seventeen years ago would have been even better.
Reuters: World warming unhindered by cold spells: The pace of global warming continues unabated, scientists said on Thursday, despite images of Europe crippled by a deep freeze and parts of the United States blasted by blizzards.... "It's not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven't warmed in the past 50 years," veteran Australian climate scientist Neville Nicholls told an online climate science media briefing. "January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we've ever seen," said Nicholls of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne. "Last November was the hottest November we've ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen," he said of the satellite data record since 1979. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000....
Scientists say global warming is not uniform in all areas and that climate models predict there will likely be greater extremes of cold and heat, floods and droughts. "Global warming is a trend superimposed upon natural variability, variability that still exists despite global warming," said Kevin Walsh, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne. "It would be much more surprising if the global average temperature just kept on going up, year after year, without some years of slightly cooler temperatures," he said in a written reply to questions for the briefing...
I think it's time for me to make a formal apology to Al Gore for not doing enough to boost his issues and his voice over the past two decades.
Jeffrey Davis on Global Warming: Re: "The current lack of warming us forecasted to last until at least 2020 leaving us with no warming for at least1/4 of a century." Well, no. This year looks to be the warmest on record. It could change but even with a relatively weak El Nino, temps [so far] are above 1998....
UPDATE: Russ Roberts writes that it's not his fault--that he wasn't lying to his readers--but that it's the Daily Mail's fault: the Daily Mail was lying to him:
Finally, Brad DeLong calls me a liar: Brad doesn’t like this post.... I had read (and linked to) this article from the Daily Mail.... "Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming." How would you interpret that last sentence?.... Had I read the BBC version, I also would have known that Jones thinks there is a warming trend rather than merely a trend that is not statistically significant. I should have said that Jones admits that “for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.” My mistake. Dear readers, I did not mean to trick you. (I refrain from mentioning that Brad knew that I had linked to the Daily Mail story rather than the BBC version. I’ll just assume he made an honest mistake.)
Well, I would interpret "that last sentence," being that it was from the Daily Mail, as needing to be carefully checked and handled with tongs.
It's not an accident that the BBC version and reality conflict with the Daily Mail.
To get your information about the world from the Daily Mail is first of all to lie to yourself:
On 27 April 2007, film star Hugh Grant accepted damages over claims made about his relationships with his former girlfriends in three separate tabloid articles published in the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday on 18, 21 and 24 February. His lawyer stated that all of the articles' "allegations and factual assertions are false." Grant said, in a written statement, that he took the action because: "I was tired of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday papers publishing almost entirely fictional articles about my private life for their own financial gain. I'm also hoping that this statement in court might remind people that the so-called 'close friends' or 'close sources' on which these stories claim to be based almost never exist."
World football governing body, FIFA, also filed a lawsuit against the Daily Mail due to comments made by sportswriter >* Andrew Jennings against the organisation and its president Sepp Blatter.
The Daily Mail falsely reported that former child star Mark Lester assaulted his ex-wife and had allowed his son to share a bedroom with Michael Jackson. In 2008 substantial damages along with legal costs were awarded to Mark Lester after he launched a libel case against the paper.
Other libel awards against the Daily Mail (and Mail on Sunday) include:
November 2009 - Actress Kate Winslet awarded £25,000 in damages after an article in the Daily Mail titled "Should Kate Winslet win an Oscar for the world's most irritating actress?" accuses her of lying about her exercise regime.
2009 - September — Metropolitan police commander Ali Dizaei accepts 'substantial' damages after a story falsely accusing him of being a bigamist.
2009 - May — Labour MP Tom Watson accepts 'substantial undisclosed damages' over untrue allegations he 'was not only copied into emails between former Downing Street press adviser Damian McBride and activist Derek Draper but "encouraged" them.'
2009 - May — three women whose stories had appeared in an article about women who'd adopted children, suggesting they did so for 'selfish' reasons, were awarded £10,000 each in damages.
2009 - January - £30,000 award to Dr Austen Ivereigh, who had worked for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, accused of hypocrisy over abortion.
2007 - May — Actress Keira Knightley awarded £3,000 for an article in which it was falsely claimed she was anorexic.
2006 - May - £100,000 damages for Elton John, falsely accused of rude and dictatorial behaviour
2006 - April — Undisclosed damages paid to actress Sharon Stone following a story falsely claiming she'd left her child in a car unattended while she ate at a nearby restaurant.
2006 - March — A formal apology and substantial damages awarded to businessman Sheldon Adelson, in a case estimated to have cost £4m.
2004 - April — Actor Rowan Atkinson was paid 'substantial' damages after story falsely stating he was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
2003- October — Actress Diana Rigg awarded £30,000 in damages over story which 'wrongly portrayed her as an embittered woman who held British men in low regard'
2003 - August — Actress Nicole Kidman awarded 'substantial' damages after false story accused her of having an affair with actor Jude Law
2001 - February — Businessman Alan Sugar was awarded £100,000 in damages following story which falsly accused him of 'being "miserly" in his stewardship of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.'
He doesn't even try very hard...
Russ Roberts:
Cafe Hayek: Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times: "Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill..."
He’s right in principle. One observation doesn’t make a trend. Of course Phil Jones has said recently that there’s no trend for the last 15 years. But never mind...
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods...
Russ Roberts knows as well as I do--as well as anybody who has taken even one semester of statistics does--that "no trend" does not mean the same thing as "no statistically significant trend," that you are unlikely to find statistical significance when you restrict your attention to a short period because your statistical tests then lack power, and that everyone literate in statistics asked for their point estimate of the warming trend since 1975 would say that it is almost as much as the overall trend since 1860: 0.012C per year as compared to 0.015C per year.
Russ Roberts knows all this. But he hopes to trick some of his readers by hiding it.
Of all the strange things in Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner's Superfreakonomics, perhaps the strangest of all is page 186:
with its remarkable claim that that "there is this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown steadily louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased."
Back when Superfreakonomics first came out, this cliam puzzled everybody: when an economist says that something has decreased, he or she means that there is some way of estimating a trend over some period of time that produces a statistically-significant declining trend. Nobody could figure out how to do that with global temperature data..
Now it turns out that what Levitt and Dubner meant was something different: that 2005 was the hottest year on record, and that that record high temperature had not yet been broken--so global temperatures had "decreased" from their high back in 2005.
There have been thirteen new global annual temperature records set in the past 130 years--about one per decade. Since a new global temperature record is set once every ten years, Levitt and Dubner's methodology would thus lead them to say that over the past century and a third global temperatures have been decreasing 90% of the time--yet over that interval temperatures in total have risen by almost a full 1C. There have been eight new global annual temperature records set in the past forty years. That's one every five years. So by their methodology over the past sixty years global temperatures have been decreasing 80% of the time--yet over that interval temperatures in total have risen by a full 0.5C.
What odds would you need in order to take a bet that we will not see a hotter year than 2005 before 2020?
Climate Change—Some Simple (and Quite Convenient) Truths: As world leaders gather in Copenhagen, climate change is again in the headlines. The science of the issue can get pretty incomprehensible pretty quickly. And the politics are clearly very ugly. Let’s not forget, however, that much of the economics is simple.
It’s an externality, stupid—so price it
Climate change is an “externality” problem. Individuals, firms, and, yes, governments, do not take full account of the harm that others suffer when they emit greenhouse gases. So they emit too much. And the best way to stop them doing this is to charge them a price for the carbon content of what they emit: a “carbon price.” Admittedly, climate change is a particularly complicated externality. Since the damage will fall largely on future generations, the proper price depends very much on how we value their well-being relative to ours. The importance of such long-lived investments as power-stations, and the heavy sunk costs of investing in new technologies, mean that the carbon prices people expect in the future are even more important than the price now. And the fact that the world’s supply of fossil fuels is ultimately fixed means that the effect of carbon prices on total emissions is not as clear cut as it may seem. But the basic principle remains—polluters should pay...
Thus wroth against the deniers he put on the gift of the god,
Which Hephaistos had wrought for him by his art.
First on his legs he set the fair greaves fitted with silver ankle-pieces,
Next he donned the cuirass about his breast.
Then round his shoulders he slung the bronze sword silver-studded;
lastly he took the great and strong shield,
And its brightness shone afar off as the moon's....
And forth from its stand he drew his father`s spear, heavy and great and strong:
That spear could none other of the Akhaians wield...
Thers:
Eschaton: Here are the places I personally go when I want the lowdown on the most current wingnut lies about climate change, particularly, nowadays, to do with the email theft. List not remotely definitive (I'm in the humanities, dammit). Deltoid -- Tim Lambert is worth reading for his own stuff, but the real fun is the comments, where you'll see silly denialist trolling avant la lettre. Tomorrow's bullshit, today! And just as quickly debunked. DeSmogBlog: Don't miss the Crock of the Week. SwiftHack is a good repository. Real Climate, and responses: here, here, here. This Nature editorial. George Will, filleted. And I like Eli's site.
Unhelpful Hansen: [T]oday’s op-ed article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control. And that’s not a small matter, because he’s now engaged in a misguided crusade against cap and trade, which is — let’s face it — the only form of action against greenhouse gas emissions we have any chance of taking before catastrophe becomes inevitable.... [A]n emissions tax of the form Hansen wants and a system of tradable emission permits, aka cap and trade, are essentially equivalent.... A tax puts a price on emissions, leading to less pollution. Cap and trade puts a quantitative limit on emissions, but from the point of view of any individual, emitting requires that you buy more permits... so the incentives... for individual action to reduce emissions are the same under the two systems. This is true even if some emitters are “grandfathered” with free allocations of permits, as will surely be the case. They still have an incentive to cut their emissions, so that they can sell their excess permits to others.
The only difference is the nature of uncertainty over the aggregate outcome. If you use a tax, you know what the price of emissions will be, but you don’t know the quantity... if you use a cap, you know the quantity but not the price.... [T]he question about uncertainty is secondary; the fact is that cap and trade works. Hansen admits that the sulfur dioxide cap has reduced pollution, but argues that it didn’t do enough; well, it did as much as it was designed to do. If Hansen thinks it should have done more, he should be campaigning for a lower cap, not trashing the whole program...
More Bad Climate Science from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page...: One doesn't have to go all the way back to snowball earth to know that the Lindzen is full of it. Ice ages come and go with, evidently, very subtle forcing due to the Earth's wobble. I don't see how anyone can doubt that there is strong positive feedback around the current temperature.
Now snowball earth is fascinating for the reason that Hoffman and Schrag just started when you stopped the tape. According to H and S, the Earth was a snowball just before the Cambrian explosion -- All sorts of fossiles suddenly appear. Now one hint of an explanation is in the "grinding glaciers" and then "extreme erosion" parts of their story. Since I heard of the snowball earth hypothesis I wonder if the cambrian explosion is so explosive partly because late pre-cambrian fossils were destroyed by glaciers and erosion and such -- crushing, grinding, dissolving eroding all sound like destroying the then relatively recent fossil record.
Also maybe the explosion had something to do with the near extinction of life. Geographic isolation of small groups of organisms causes an increase in diversity. It is suspected (by Sewell shifting balance Wright et al) that such isolation is required for major evolutionary change which almost has to pass through not very fit halfway to the new life form stages and so might require random drift down a fitness gradient.
If life was restricted to isolated patches around volcanos one could imagine that the life in each hot spot would end up very different. Then when the ice melts you have great diversity (for a while).
Finally constrained areas can promote gigantism. When organisms can spread it helps to reproduce quickly. When they are stuck with each other, fighting over meager food, it helps to be a bit bigger than the other guy. It is sometimes suspected that there was a whole lot of variety in the pre-cambrian but the animals were just not big enough to leave fossils.
So the part they were about to get to when you cut their mikes is great too.
Hoisted from comments: A recommendation for "harsh measures" from Robert Waldmann:
Ken Caldeira on Levitt and Dubner and Geoengineering: That's an excellent interview [with Caldeira]. On the other hand, I think we are getting close to the point where we ought to let Caldeira get back to doing research.
I would like to focus on one point "China or India then went into a decade or two of deep drought." That is not just a scary story Caldeira pulled out of his hat. Simulations tend to suggest that SO2 geoengineering will cause reduced precipitation in India and China. To be very very frank, I think that there is a silver lining to that cloudlessness. A big global warming problem is getting China and India on board. If, say, the USA could honestly say:
that's a nice monsoon you have there. It would be a pity if something were to happen to it.
Oh and by the way, we really really don't want to send SO2 into the stratosphere, because it might cause you a terrible drought. But if we see no alternative way to fight global warming, we might feel forced to send the SO2 up the tubes and hope for the best."
I'd say the effect on geopolitics is a feature not a bug of SO2 geoengineering research.
My personal position is that China and India are poor, so rich countries should pay all of the costs of reducing their emissions. But that's not going to happen is it? Might as well put our faith in global cooling ponies. So I conclude that threatening them with an 18 mile long tube is third best.
Geoengineering the Planet: The Possibilities and the Pitfalls: Caldeira argues that sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions is by far the most prudent course. Still, given the huge volume of carbon dioxide that humanity continues to pour into the atmosphere, Caldeira says it would be folly not to undertake research into geoengineering. With the prospect that the world could reach a level of dangerous warming this century, Caldeira maintains it’s necessary to determine which projects — such as putting particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight into space — might work and which will not. He likens geoengineering schemes to seatbelts — a technology that might reduce the chance of injury in case of a climate crash. But, warned Caldeira, “Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, ‘Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.’ It’s crazy.”
Yale Environment 360: I want to start with this little dust-up over SuperFreakonomics. In the book, you are quoted as saying, when it comes to global warming, “Carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Is that accurate?
Ken Caldeira: That is not accurate. I don’t believe I said anything remotely like that because I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don’t think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon.
e360: They also write that you are convinced that human activity is responsible for “some” global warming. What does that mean?
Caldeira: I don’t think we can say with certainty whether we’re responsible for 90 percent of it or we might be responsible for 110 percent of it...
e360: Another thing that plays in to the same kind of sensibility is the idea that the doubling of CO2 traps less than 2 percent of the outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth. When that’s phrased like that, it makes it sound like it’s not really much of a problem.
*Caldeira: *You should think of the whole global warming problem as a 1 percent problem, at least for doubling of CO2. In absolute temperature Kelvin — scientists like to use the Kelvin scale — the current Earth temperature is around 288 degrees Kelvin, and a 3-degree warming on top of that is basically a one-percent additional warming. And so this whole issue of climate change, when viewed from an Earth-system perspective, is a story about 1 percents and 2 percents...
e360: The authors also cite you as saying that a doubling of CO2 yields a 70-percent increase in plant growth, suggesting it would be a boon to agricultural activity. It sounds like one of those old CO2-is-good-for-you ads. Can you explain that?
Caldeira: Yes... the 70-percent increase in plant growth... came out of a paper that we produced, I believe, in 2005. We took a model... which has a very low climate sensitivity, and what I would consider a hyperactive land biosphere--produced 9-degree Centigrade warming globally and 20 degrees around East Antarctica. Now that’s 16 degrees Fahrenheit globally, and something like 36 degrees around Antarctica.... So we were showing, look, even if CO2 fertilization is at the high end of anybody’s imagination, we still produce rather frightening temperatures. But I do believe the basic sign is correct, that with more CO2, plants can use water more efficiently... agricultural productivity will increase in the mid and high latitudes, where warmer weather will help the plants grow, but will decrease productivity in the poor equatorial nations where heat is already stressing crop yield.
e360: Overall, do you feel like your work has been accurately and fairly represented in this book?
Caldeira: The main misrepresentation is the quote that says that CO2 is not “the right villain”... but if you say what’s the primary gas responsible for the planetary warming, I would say it’s carbon dioxide.... [T]he other statements that are attributed to me... based in fact and based on studies.... [P]ull back to the case of the biosphere taking up 70 percent of CO2--well, yes, we have a published study that said that. It also presented results saying that we might warm up the planet enough to risk melting Antarctica.... [T]here is a selective use of quotes. If you spend several hours talking to somebody and they take a half-dozen things and put it in a book, then it’s going to be in the context and framing of arguments that the authors are trying to make... the contexts and the framing of those issues are very different from the context and framing that I would put those same facts in... So I think that the casual reader can... come up with a misimpression of what I believe and what I feel about things.
e360: Let’s talk a little bit more broadly about geoengineering. I was struck by something one of the authors said on NPR the other day — that he got interested in geoengineering when he realized that the problem with global warming is not that there is too much carbon in the air; it’s that it is too hot. Do you agree with that?
Caldeira: The reason it is too hot is that there is too much carbon dioxide in the air. Now the carbon dioxide itself, of course, has big negative implications for ocean acidification and ecosystems, including coral reefs. So there are direct CO2 effects.... [I]f we had some magic thing that would reverse all effects of CO2 perfectly, then you could say, “Well the problem is not CO2.” But nobody really expects that we are going to have some magic, perfect CO2 nullifier.... [T]o present it as if, “Well, it not’s really CO2, but the effects of CO2,” it’s like if you got shot by a bullet and you said, “Well, it wasn’t really the bullet that was the problem, it was just that I happened to have this hole through my body...”
e360: Right. Well, a lot of people think of geoengineering as a quick and cheap fix for global warming. Is it?
Caldeira: Let’s pretend for a moment that putting dust in the stratosphere is easy to do and works reasonably well... and that China or India then went into a decade or two of deep drought. Whether the system caused that drought or not, I think the Chinese or the Indians would rightly suspect that the reason they have this drought and ensuing famines might be due to this system that was put up by these other countries. And you could easily imagine that there would be a great amount of political tension.... Then, of course, the system is not going to work perfectly... not going to address... ocean acidification... not going to perfectly offset global warming.... [G]eoengineering options [are] something we would only want to consider if our backs were really up against the wall... because the alternatives look so frightening.
e360: I know that some scientists have suggested that there should be some kind of taboo on geoengineering research. But I know that you’ve been outspoken in the need for a federally-funded geoengineering research program. Can you explain that?
Caldeira: Yes, I think we don’t know right now whether these kinds of approaches have the potential to reduce risk or not. In our climate models, the amount of climate change can be reduced by these kinds of approaches, but the climate models are an imperfect reflection of reality.... Let’s say geoengineering doesn’t work, and that it would add to risk. It seems to me it would be worth having a research program to demonstrate that beyond a reasonable doubt so we can all forget about this and move on. On the other hand, if these options do have the potential to reduce risk, then it seems to me that we would like to have the option to reduce that risk should a time come where that would seem necessary. I kind of think of these geoengineering options as seeing, “Well, can we invent some kind of seatbelts for our climate system?” We need to drive the climate system carefully, we need to greatly reduce emissions. But even if we’re driving carefully we still run the risk of getting into an accident. And seatbelts can potentially reduce the damage when we’re in an accident.... I’m much in favor of a very broad-spectrum approach.... [T]hinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, “Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can’t just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.” It’s crazy.
e360: Can you sketch briefly what a geoengineering research program might look like?
Caldeira: The first thing I would do is use the plural, and say “programs.” Because many different things are lumped into the same category.... David Keith and Klaus Lackner have been looking at capture of carbon dioxide from the air.... [T]hat’s very different from, say, putting sulfur dust in the stratosphere.... [T]wo new programs — one looking at what are the scalable, fast-acting things we could do in the event of an emergency. What could we do fast that would start the earth cooling within a couple of years if we really wanted to? And then I think we need another research program in saying how can we backpedal out of our high greenhouse gas concentrations....
e360: Do you think it’s inevitable that we’re going to try to engineer the Earth’s climate?
Caldeira: First of all, nobody can really see the future.... I think that there are pathways that we might start regionally and slowly ramp up to something more global. I think that’s a possibility. The other possibility is a real emergency situation where there’s a phase change in public opinion, [where] it becomes conventional wisdom that we can’t tolerate this climate change any more, that we have to do something.... I would wager that we would never deploy any geoengineering system, and that we’re more likely just to try our best to adapt to it. But I think there’s enough of a risk that it’s worth investigating whether there are options to reduce risk and damage....
[W]e’re talking here about people’s lives... I don’t think we’re going to deploy these systems to save polar bears... [but] to help people from dying of famines, or something dramatic like that. And I think that these techniques have a potential to save lives and reduce suffering, and we should explore whether that’s true or not.... [W]e’re obviously interfering with the climate system wholesale now, and it’s possible that more intelligent interference could reduce the damage from the first interference. But it could make it worse. I don’t think we know, which is why we need the research program.
For More Responsible Climate Politics: This is all very hand wavey. Take a technology like artificial carbon sequestering "trees." What that would do is simply remove carbon from the atmosphere, like real trees, but at a much greater rate. They would be relatively easy to calibrate and fine tune. This is the sort of thing I had in mind. It wouldn't "throw a wrench" into the climate. It would pretty straightforwardly change "too much" carbon in the atmosphere to "not too much" carbon in the atmosphere. That is to say, it would fix the problem. That would be fantastic, right?
It would be. And carbon tqxes (or, second best, cap-and-trade) would be a wonderful way to get John Galt's mammoth brain set to work inventing them, wouldn't it? But somehow Will doesn't see it that way...
Now there are many MANY problems with solar replacing coal, from the energy storage issue to potential use of rare-metal components. Solar is not a panacea, and the real conclusion that one reaches is nuclear power, and lots of it. I can easily construct a solid argument that solar is not viable for most of our electricity needs:
It doesn't work at night/cloudy conditions without additional energy storage.
It is vastly more $/W to manufacturer than a coal plant, when you include the cost of energy storage.
Many solar technologies (eg, Nanosolar's thin films) involve very rare metals (eg, indium). It is unclear what a real ramp-up of solar production would do to that market.
and that QED: we need nuclear power. (It is fun to taunt greenpeace with this, BTW).
But instead Myhrvold defends his position badly...
He repeats the black canard, without mentioning that 1kWh of coal-energy also releases 1kWh of thermal energy, so unless you are placing the solar panel on a surface with albedo less than .3, even just the thermal heating argument is false. Or if you use an alternate approach ("White roof is 1T C02 per 10 m^2 annual savings equivelent" Akbari's estimate), you are still talking the CO2 load of just 500 kWh/yr of a coal plant. If your 10 m^2 roof generates 1.5 kW for 6 hours/day, that is $5/W to <$2/W. Since so much of the cost of the cells for the study is the refining of silicon, there is probably a similar drop in kWh of construction per watt of power. He misses one of the huge reasons why the efficiency crowd want buildings to have a high albeido: simply to lower the AC bill for free, and thus why you should put solar cells on the roof of your garage rather than the house itself...
He compares the cost of running a coal plant with the cost of building a solar plant, neglecting that we need to construct vastly more power plants to both meet growing demand and to deal with end-of-life on
old, inefficient plants. Even then, the breakeven point is less than 3 years, by his inflate-the-cost of solar figure!
What I don't get is why they are taking this approach.
It would be easy enough to go "Whoops, the 'because they are black' quote was taken a bit out of context as a joke, thats really minor all things considered. The real reasons solar is not a panacea relate to energy storage, etc..., its being corrected in the second printing." The conclusion thus stands, but the argument becomes sound. So why defend it stupid? Is it simply trolling for attention?
Instead, what is happening is I have to conclude that anything Myhrvold says has to be assumed to be false until proven otherwise, and by unquestioningly accepting his assumptions, anything Drubner and
Levitt say may need to be taken the same way.
I guess I really do need to apologize to Tim Harford for calling him a defender of Levitt and Dubner's Superfreakonomics climate chapter...
Tim writes:
FT.com | The Undercover Economist: Perhaps I was naive in my reading of Superfreakonomics, but it didn’t occur to me that the chapter on geoengineering would stir up such a storm. I liked the book, but worried about the chapter. I wrote:
As for the final chapter on global warming, it is a striking discussion of geo-engineering, surveying various schemes for cooling down the planet rather than trying to prevent climate change by cutting carbon emissions. This is a strong story, but it is also one-sided, portraying the geo-engineers as brilliant iconoclasts, dismissing the objections to geo-engineering as the knee-jerk reaction of the unreflective, and failing to convey the views of a single credible geo-engineering sceptic. A well-deserved swipe at Al Gore does not really count.
According to this chapter, the only reason everyone is making so much fuss about carbon dioxide is that they’ve never heard of geo-engineering, or are the kind of stubborn Luddites who think technology never solved anything. I have some sympathy with that view but the section nevertheless needed more balance....
Brad DeLong even thinks the above paragraphs constitute a defence of the global warming chapter; well, you be the judge of that.... I read all the criticism and the back and forth, went back to the original review, which I penned three weeks ago, and... I don’t think I’d change a word. It is a strong story. And it is one-sided.
How did I get here? Steve Dubner is an excellent, excellent reporter and writer. There is nobody sharper than Steve Levitt when he is on. I like the idea of geoengineering. I am both a science fiction geek and an economist--thus I am the key demographic for geoengineering. I would love to watch the 18,000 mile in diameter parasol being nudged into its metastable orbit at L1. And I definitely think that a lot of research into geoengineering possibilities should be one of the strings to our bow--alongside conservation, efficiency, and the move to closed-carbon-cycle and non-carbon energy technologies--in dealing with global warming.
But I don't think that research into geoengineering possibilities is properly conducted by people--like Nathan Myhrvold--who appear to be so bad at figuring orders of magnitude that they genuinely think that solar panels on net warm the earth, nor that what they say should be relied on.
And I definitely don't think people should misinform their readers by saying that the global cooling warnings of the 1970s were like the global wqrming warnings of today, or that the "climate agnostics" have a point because human activity contributes only 2% of the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or that particulates worldwide have been going down over the past several decades, or that trees are a net source of global warming, or that the world has been cooling over the past several years, that Nathan Myhrvold has thought more about ecological disaster scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer, or that coal is so cheap that it is "economic suicide" to move away from it as an energy source.
The only story that makes sense is that Dubner and Levitt went to Intellectual Ventures, were wowed by their presentations--that is, after all, reputed to be the key competitive advantage of Intellectual Ventures, that and patent trolling--and then somehow... failed to sharpen their wits and do their due diligence.
And as best as I can see they are still failing. Someone who wishes me ill sends me a transcript from NPR, a piece of which reads:
LEVITT: Now, in the long run, perhaps you'll want to deal with the [high] carbon[-dioxide] issue [even with geoengineering] because we're going to have acidification of the oceans and the coral reefs will die if we don't do something about the carbon. But if you just buy the time to keep the Earth cool for a while longer, I am certain that if we invest we will come up with technology that will allow us much more effectively in the future to pull carbon out of the air than we currently have....
Let's think about what such a technology might be...
We need to pull the CO2 out of the air--which means we need to chemically change it in some way, because it is quite a stable molecule and a very gaseous one as it is. We are going to have to break some of the carbon-oxygen bonds. When we do, oxygen will be free and looking hard for two electrons--but we can get it to bond to itself and then it will float off into the atmosphere, causing no immediate problems: there is a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere already, and a little more won't change concentrations appreciably enough to cause any problems. We then can bond the carbon to itself and to hydrogen atoms, making long nice organic molecule chains out of which we can make textiles or plastics or cellulose or any of a bunch of other materials.
Sounds really cool!
The problem is that breaking these carbon-oxygen bonds takes energy. So let's fire up some more coal-fired power plants to generate the energy. Since our technology is really efficient, it won't take that much energy, right?
Wrong.
Coal-fired power plants make energy by making carbon-oxygen bonds. A bond is a bond. To break a carbon-oxygen bond and make a carbon-carbon one in order to pull a carbon atom out of the atmosphere takes as much energy as you get when you break a carbon-carbon bond and make a carbon-oxygen one in a coal-fired powr plant. So in order to pull one atom of carbon out of atmosphere via our magic efficient technology we have to--if we are powering it by coal--push one atom of carbon into the atmosphere.
So now we have (a) our normal power plants to power our civilization, plus (b) our atmosphere carbon-scrubbing industry, which is (c) powered by even more carbon power plants to generate the power to break the carbon-oxygen bonds that our first set of power plants made. But plants (c) put more carbon into the atmosphere than plants (a) did.
I know, says Steve Levitt, we can power our carbon-scrubbing industry (b) by power plants (c) that use nuclear or solar or... But then why not power our original civilization-sustaining power plants (a) by nuclear or solar or whatever?
I know, says Steve Levitt: we can build self-reproducing nano-machines to pick up ambient sunlight and use it to break carbon-oxygen bonds and fix carbon. That way we don't have to build either our carbon-scrubbing industry (b) or our power plants (c). And since they reproduce autonomously, they are costless in the long run. We can assemble them into aggregate structures and--at this point Matthew Yglesias breaks in: we could call them "trees"...
I can't conclude anything other than that Levitt and Dubner have failed to sit down and think any of this through to its conclusion. Which is too bad. Because we know they can think and communicate--and think and communicate accurately and very well...
A breakfast companion points out that there seem to be three big differences between Levitt and Dubner on the one hand and we economists who tend to worry about global warming on the other. He further points out that these are all due to the fact that Levitt and Dubner today appear to no longer be thinking like economists. Economists believe that there are always substitutes--alternatives; economists believe that there are always complements--always ways of doing things that reinforce each other, especially in situations of uncertainty in which diversification is especially valuable; economists believe that orders of magnitude are very important and that the right simple numbers are good guides to orders of magnitude;
The first is that we economists see geoengineering as a complement to other measures--as something you research now in addition to clean energy technologies; as important to do because uncertainty is rife and so diversification to reduce risk is much more than usually important; and as something that you do in the future as your other conservation, efficiency, and shift-away-from-open-carbon energy policies take hold--and that (if they work) allow you to do less of other policies. (Though perhaps not all that much less, in all probability: a world with significantly more CO2 and significantly less sunlight and significantly more acid rain would be very different from our current world in a number of ways we do not know understand, some of which might be quite costly.) Dubner and Levitt, by contrast, appear to see them as substitutes--as what we do not in addition but instead of conservation. For Levitt and Dubner, we do geoengineering, and then we don't have to do anything else--that conservation on the one hand and geoengineering on the other are alternative "way[s] to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.
The second is Levitt and Dubner's buying of Nathan Myhrvold's claims that "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide" and that "energy consumed by building thousands of new solar plans necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term 'warming debt'." Your standard economist's response to "there are no cost-effective substitutes" is always "you must be joking." Your standard economist's response to the claim that it is very costly to shift the productive structure of an economy from one configuration to another is always "show me the money." Yet that doesn't happen in this case:
Mr. LEVITT: Right. But I just don't--if you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution...
That's just not economics: economics is that incentives change, and as incentives change people's behavior changes.
The third is that Levitt and Dubner no longer think like normal economists in looking not just for a number but for the right number relevant to a back-of-the-envelope calculation. For example, they write:
When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay...
Yoram Bauman questions this:
More Superfreakonomics: I have just seen a PDF of the Superfreakonomics chapter on climate change, and it makes basic mistakes when it says things like “When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice… the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.”... [Y]es, human generation of CO2 is dwarfed by natural processes like plant decay. But it also shows that natural processes balance each other out: plant decay generates massive amounts of CO2, and plant growth takes in massive amounts of CO2 via photosynthesis. What you’re left with is a completely plausible story in which human activity slowly increases atmospheric concentrations of CO2 from pre-industrial concentrations of about 285ppm (parts per million) to current concentrations of about 385ppm that are going up by about 2ppm per year.
This sort of misleading skepticism exists throughout the chapter, and it does a disservice to climate science, to economists like me who work on climate change, to academic work in general, and to the general public that will have to live with the impacts of climate policy down the road....
Steve Levitt responds:
I don’t understand your comment below. Why does it matter if natural processes are in balance or not? CO2 is CO2! The source doesn’t matter. If we could cut CO2 emissions a little bit overall, whether through natural sources or others, the effect would be the same. It is not saying that cutting human emissions isn’t the right way to do it, but it is a surprising fact and one worth mentioning...
Yoram Bauman tries again:
[Y]ou are ignoring the overall thrust of the chapter, which is terribly misleading. It’s not factually incorrect to write that “agnostics… grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions”, or to give big play to media stories from the 1970s about “global cooling”, or to write that Lowell Wood says that global sea level will rise 1.5 feet by 2100... but all of these statements collectively give a terribly misleading perspective:
Yes there are agnostics who “grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions”, but this is not a reason to doubt the theory of anthropogenic climate change. The book makes it sound like YOU are among the agnostics, and this is bad....
So that’s my two cents: Your chapter pains me not because it’s factually incorrect but because it clearly gives a misleading impression of the scientific consensus on climate change. I am reminded of your quorum on global warming that your blog colleagues were kind enough to invite me to participate in. There’s nothing factually wrong in there, but it is terribly misleading that the two scientists you quote are BOTH skeptics. What are the odds of that? Probably a billion to one, so my unavoidable conclusion is that you are deliberately trying to cast doubt on the scientific consensus. I don’t mind if you do this in a straightforward way by getting involved in climate research, but to do it via insinuations is in my opinion a disservice to to climate science, to economists like me who work on climate change, to academic work in general, and to the general public that will have to live with the impacts of climate policy down the road...
Steve Bloom chimes in:
The business about the CO2 stocks and flows boils down to an argument from personal incredulity: How could puny man affect a systerm so large? Levitt isn’t that stupid. The only “agnostics” who point to it are those who themselves lack an understanding of the climate system or are actively encouraging misunderstanding by others. It would be one thing if he mentioned it by way of explaining and debunking, but it doesn’t sound as if he does.... I now see that the CO2 point was intentionally framed to mislead and confuse.
And my brain has just exploded:
Excuse me while I pick up stray neuronal clumps from the many different corners of the room...
I mean, Levitt and Dubner’s passage really ought to read:
When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay. Of course the agnostics are misleadiing you: even though human activity creates just 2% of the flow of emissions, already there is 50% more CO2 in the atmosphere than there would be without human activity...
or:
When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay. Of course the agnostics are misleadiing you: even though human activity creates just 2% of the flow of emissions, once human-created CO2 is in the atmosphere it takes longer for nature to absorb the nature-created CO2. As a result, already there is 50% more CO2 in the atmosphere than there would be without human activity…
or:
When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay. Of course the agnostics are misleadiing you: the right way to think about it is that already 1/3 of the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere are the products of human actiivity, and the fraction and amount are growing very rapidly indeed…
Levitt and Dubner structure their passage to say (a) only 2% of emissions are of human origin, and (b) the fact that only 2% of emissions are of human origin is relevant to and supports an “agnostic” position on global warming.
But that is a lie: itt does not support an agnostic position. It is grossly, grossly misleading for Dubner and Levitt to talk about how the relative flows are "a surprising fact and one worth mentioning." They know damned, damned well that what is relevant to the "agnostic" positon are not the flows but rather the stocks. And they know damned, damned well even though only 2% of the new CO2 molecules created are of human origin, a full 30% of the stock of CO2 molecules existing is of human origin--with that percentage climbing every day.
Oh! There’s my right parietal lobe over there under the couch!
Let me give Steve Levitt the last word:
Steven Levitt:
...I do think also that there is something to be said for raising some skepticism about the current climate models and predictions... they are stated and restated as if they are fact, when in practice I suspect, and good scientists agree, that there is enormous uncertainty and things we cannot or at least could not know...
No, let me give maureendowdsemailfriend@gmail.com the last word:
While eco-cultists like Al Gore keep referring to a 6 degree C rise in global temperature as some sort of doomsday scenario, the agnostics grumble that the temperature of the earth is already 287 Kelvin, so we're talking about a mere 2% increase.
Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com: Much of the outcry was made by people who had read Romm but not our book — which isn’t surprising, since the book isn’t out until October 20. As the noise grew, Romm added on the charge that “the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book” – that is, to read the actual text online. Smells like a conspiracy theory, no?
But nobody stopped anything. The text was never searchable on Amazon for the simple reason that the book wasn’t yet published, which is standard procedure. I don’t know where Romm got this fact – or if perhaps it was just too good a rumor to not be true...
(1) Dubner's "nobody stopped anything" is simply wrong. Romm posted a .pdf of Freakonomics chapter 5. Somebody--Dubner and Levitt's publisher--then did require Romm to take it down. That takedown is in sharp contrast to the behavior of some other publishers these days, who are eager to offer sample chapters online.
(2) Moreover, Romm says that as of last week he was able to use Amazon's "search inside the book" function on Superfreakonomics, and that somebody turned it off. I believe him:
(1) Joshua Gans identifies in Dubner and Levitt an odd inconsistency that I’ve identified more broadly: those who go on and on about how people respond to incentives when they’re making a pro-free-market argument suddenly seem to lose all faith in the power of incentives when the goal is to induce more environmentally friendly behavior:
But come on. Isn’t the whole point of the Freakonomics project that prices work and behaviour changes in response to incentives? Everywhere else, a few pennies will cause massive consumption changes while when it comes to a carbon price, it is all too hard.
(2) Ryan Avent makes a general point about people who dismiss cap-and-trade as too hard, then promote something else that only seems easier because you haven’t thought it through. I agree with him about the carbon tax issue; and while I hadn’t thought about applying the same principle to geoengineering, he’s completely right. Having somebody--who? The United States? The United Nations? The Coalition of the Willing?--pump sulfur into the atmosphere through an 18-mile tube, or cut off sunlight with a giant orbital mirror, would either (a) require many years of hard negotiations or (b) quite possibly set off World War III. If it’s (a), why is that so much easier than a global agreement on emissions? (Which, as Brad points out, really would only have to involve four big players.)
(3) Andrew Gelman poses a question:
The interesting question to me is why is it that “pissing off liberals” is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas “pissing off conservatives” is boring and earnest?
I have a theory here, although it may not be the whole story: it’s about careerism. Annoying conservatives is dangerous: they take names, hold grudges, and all too often find ways to take people who annoy them down. As a result, the Kewl Kids, as Digby calls them, tread very carefully when people on the right are concerned — and they snub anyone who breaks the unwritten rule and mocks those who must not be offended. Annoying liberals, on the other hand, feels transgressive but has historically been safe. The rules may be changing... but it’s been that way for a long time.
So I finally got a copy of chapter 5 of Superfreakonomics.
In the abstract I really like the idea of cheap geoengineering solutions to global warming. My personal favorite is a giant parasol 18,000 miles in diameter at L1 to absorb and then reradiate a chunk of sunlight in other bands. But I have never been able to find anyone here at Berkeley who (a) knows what they are talking about, and (b) agrees with Levitt and Dubner that we know that Al Gore efficiency-and-conservation solutions are much less cost-effective than Mt. Pinatubo geoengineering solutions in dealing with global warming. That NASA and Energy and OSTP should be working on and funding research into the possibilities of geoengineering is something everybody I talk to agrees with. But nobody I talk to agrees with Levitt and Dubner that efficiency-and-conservation efforts are futile, and that we should shut them down to bet all our chips on geoengineering.
It really does look to me like Levitt and Dubner:
went to Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures.
got wowed.
excitedly wrote up what they heard.
and then failed to do their intellectual due diligence about what they were told there.
Thus I have a little unsolicited advice for Levitt and Dubner. If I were them, I would abjectly apologize. And I would then start editing the chapter thus:
pp. 165-6: Change to no longer put "global cooling" in the 1970s and "global warming" today in parallel: The scientists in the 1970s who were worried about global cooling had neither the quantative evidence, the climate models, the understanding of forcing processes, or the peer-reviewed consensus that analysis of global warming has today. Placing the two in parallel is simply wrong.
pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that the quotes from Newsweek were the words of "scientists."
pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that Newsweek was accurately citing the 1975 NAS Study--which says not that the globe is likely to cool but instead that we don't know enough about climate to forecast trends, and tht we need to do more research.
p. 167: Change to make explicit the claim that switching to an all-vegetarian diet reduces your carbon footprint by about the same order of magnitude as does switching to a hybrid car. But do not say that cars and trucks do not "contribute an ungodly share of greenhouse gases." They do--it's just that human meat-intensive agriculture contributes and ungodly share as well.
p. 168: Change to make the point that the fact that our estimates of climate effects are imprecise is not an argument for doing less or waiting to offset global warming--it is an argument for doing more and doing more now. Uncertainty is not our friend at all
p. 169: Change. Currently massively confused about Marty Weitzman's work. Marty focuses on the chance and valuation of catastrophe. He concludes that a version of the precautionary principle is appropriate: when distributions have fatter tails than log normal--which Marty thinks they do--the right policies are those that minimize the possibiliity of catastrophe. Which means starting to act now.
p. 170: Change to no longer imply that James Lovelock has some special role or authority in climate analysis or climate policy.
p. 170: Change to debunk rather than approve of British conservative Boris Johnson's claim. Johnson's statement is simply wrong. It is not the case that "the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful." We can measure greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, solar radiative forcings, and temperatures. We can tell whether acts of propitiation and atonement are working.
p. 171: Change the highly misleading: "When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay..." that 98% of carbon emissions are part of an ongoing biological cycle is not an argument supporting an "agnostic" position. And Levitt and Dubner should not hve claimed that it is.
p. 171: Change highly misleading paragraph to stress that what is relevant is not the stock but the flow: not that human activity accounts for 2% of the flow but rather that but for industrial emissions one-third (and growing) of the stock of greenhouse gases would simply not be there today.
p. 173: Change to no longer dismiss out-of-hand global agreement on climate policy. Dubner and Levitt currently write: "when it comes to actually solving climate change externalities through taxes, all we can say is good luck.... [G]reenhouse gases do not adhere to national boundaries.... Nor does one nation have the right to tell another what to do." But if the big four--U.S., EU, China, and India--of 2050 do agree, they then have the cultural, economic, and diplomatic power to coerce the rest of the world. Reaching global agreement is a very reasonable prospect.
pp. 177-181: Change to tone down the puff piece on Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures--the subsequent pages contain a lot of clues that Myhrvold and company really don't know very much about what they are talking about.
p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "Everybody turns their knobs... so they aren't the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded..." Alternatively, back this claim up with some real evidence that it is so. (The climate modelers who I talk to say that it is not.)
p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "current climate models 'do not know how to handle water vapor and various types of clouds'..." Current climate models may not handle water vapor and clouds especially well, but they do handle them.
p. 182: Also, change to reinforce point that uncertainty in climate models is not an argument for doing less now but rather an argument to do more.
p. 183: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Myhrvold: "most of the global warming over the past few decades... might actually be due to good environmental stewardship." It's not.
p. 183: Change to remove false claim that worldwide particulate pollution is shrinking rather than growing. It is still growing rather than shrinking and so still cooling the earth more with each passing year--it's only in the clean North Atlantic that heavy particulates been shrinking.
p. 183: Change to rephrase: "Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth"--other things equal, it certainly does.
19, p. 184: Change to remove false claim: "Yet [Ken Caldeira's] research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."
p. 186: Change to debunk rather than approve of false quote from Wood: "most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a [sea level] rise of about one and a half feet by 2100."
p. 186: Remove false claim: "a most surprising environmental scourge: trees." Distinguish between (a) tropical trees, (b) temperate trees, and (c) boreal trees in regions where there is a great deal of snow cover.
p. 186: Remove false claim that the earth has been cooling "over the past several years."
p. 187: Claim that "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide" needs much, much more backing-up: I can't see how it could possibly be true.
p. 187: Remove false claim: "A lot of things that people say would be a good thing probably aren't.... As an example he points to solar cells..."
p. 187: Claim that "The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-buring and other power plants would create a huge long-term 'warming debt'"--I cannot see how this could possibly be true. The overwhelming majority of power plants that are going to be in operation have not been built yet, and buildind closed-carbon-cycle or non-carbon plants is not much more expensive than building open-carbon-cycle ones.
p. 188: Remove false claim that "Myhrvold... has probably thought about such [ecological disaster] scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer."
