But there's no way to price it *today*. Even if it's a subsidy ( and the jury's quite out ) it doesn't matter because there's no market to trade offsets in.
We can't really even guess well at the actual damage.
It has nothing to do with ideology - it has to do with what people can do today. It has to do with what people can understand today.
You still have to draw to an inside straight to buy into the AGW narrative - because that's all it is, unless you're one of the dozens, hundreds or perhaps thousands that are blooded in the art.
Reporting on it is pathetic. It just repeats the narrative line. I have never seen anything quite like it - for 25 years now, there's been doomsaying and a severe shortage of details.
Nobody's even *addressing*, say, Freeeman Dyson's criticisms. They just dismiss him.
For something of this scale, 25 years is not that long of a time.
Right. It'll all change soon. That's great but it only makes sense if there's some semblance of feasibility.
Nobody is happily trashing the planet.
Fishermen *THEMSELVES* have self-regulated, with points of transfer of catches as the data collection points.
I would hope the Chinese would be ahead of us in something like this. That would make sense, for a variety of reasons.
The jury isn't out - the case has been well established. There are a bunch of well-paid advocates trying to get the case reversed, but that just a del aying tactic.
There's no good reason for any government to fail to tax carbon emissions. There's a risk of beggar-my-neighbour competition to offer lower tax rates than the neighbour next door, but a tax of $50 per ton of carbon burnt is g oing to justifiable enough that international pressure could keep everybody in line.
The EU has set up a carbon offset trading scheme, but they made a mess of i t and offsets are currently trading at closer to $10 a ton of carbon, which is cheaper than they ought to be.
Sure we can - and it's been done. The various guess don't agree too well, n ot least because the well-heeled fossil carbon extraction industry doesn't miss many chances to corrupt the people making the estimates.
The significance of right-wing ideology get discussed in the book "Merchant s of Doubt".
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which looks at number of instances where commercial interests have worked t o slow down the general acknowledgement of the significance of scientific e vidence.
One persistent feature was the enthusiasm of right-wing scientists to rejec t scientific facts that should have stopped the free market from making mon ey out of selling cigarettes or chemicals that destroyed the ozone layer.
They confused government regulation of dangerous substances with anti-free- market central planning. James Arthur does exactly the same thing here at f airly regular intervals - what he doesn't like is the government regulation , but what he chooses to object to is the scientific evidence that backs up the government regulations. He understands very little about the scientifi c evidence, but he does know he doesn't like it.
The Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences article on the acceptanc e of anthopogenic global warming by climate scientists looked at about a th ousand published climate scientists, ranked them by the usual criteria - ci tation rates and publications in more frequently cited journals, and found that 97% of the top 300 - that's 291 of them were persuaded by the case for anthropogenic global warming. I think I can name four of the hold-outs, an d each one that I can name has an irrational reason for no going along with the concensus.
Of the remaining 700-odd some 95% were persuaded. You'd expect that kind of group to include 35 nutters.
The severe shortage of detail can only mean that you have been relying on t he popular press
As they should. He hasn't got a clue, and hasn't put in the work he should have done before opening his mouth.
It's been 25 years since the scientific case started looking settled.
Arrhenius first published on the idea in 1896.
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goes into the history, and the evidence, in a lot of detail. It's aimed at graduate physicists, so the technical could be daunting to the less educate d.
It looks feasible to people who have looked at it in detail. Jenny Riesz an d her crowd aren't commercially constrained in the way the Google engineers were and while the see renewable power as somewhat more expensive in the s hort term, they do see it as perfectly feasible.
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If they are conscious of trashing the planet. Self-deceit is extremely popu lar.
Only under substantial external pressure. Without that pressure the cheats just evade the controls. Look at the history of fishing as whole - it's non
-stop over-fishing. As soon as the technology lets them wreck the fishing g rounds somebody comes in and strips them clean.
There is absolutely no way to estimate the cost in a reasonable manner. You can provide only a wide range of possibilities. If the cost cannot be estimated, there's no way to calculate a price.
You might be able to use prediction markets,. but those are unpopular and it'd take forever to converge.
There are plenty of good reasons for a government to avoid them. This may not produce a global optimum, but the incentives are complex.
This is what I mean, It's harder than it looks; there are massive unknowns.
No, it hasn't. That's simply not true. There's a handful of very low-resolution estimates and none of them agree well.
The fossil fuel extraction industry *completely lacks the resources to do that*.
I am familiar with it. It happens to apply poorly to this case.
That's a rather lousy statistic. David Friedman alone has pretty much set this back on the shelf. It even wasn't something that seemed difficult.
David Friedman is no "denier" and embraced the probability that warming is occurring but the "97%" thing is suspect.
That people do such sloppy work is terrible for the whole idea.
I'd say Freeman Dyson alone has a good enough case for doubt. I';m simply like to see a refinement of parts of the models myself.
People are *going* to have questions and criticism. That's how this works.
Hardly. Nobody can seem to explain the models. An online friend actually named the technique used and explained it a bit or I'd be completely clueless. It's all pretty new stuff; I can't say I can do it myself. I googled the techniques a bit when he told me; hopeless; just way over my head.
I tried to get him to find a ghost writer and at least publish a pamphlet but he (wisely) abstained.
He's been in this since the beginning. He has questions. He gets shouted down.
Arhenius is grist for the mill but says nothing of what we refer to as AGW.
But in this *WE ARE ALL LESS EDUCATED*. This is a problem. You can't let "An Inconvenient Truth" stand as the global standard here. There' ""Be Cool", which is better.
But it's a short list.
I am sure it'll be something that progresses. I like alts just on general principle. It's cool.
Or they just don't know.
No. This didn't work that way. Sure - a central authority helped lead it. But the fishermen understood; they play that way or the fish are gone.
But you can work out roughly how much insurance it makes sense to buy.
Some outcomes are absolutely certain. If we keep pumping CO2 into the atmos phere, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are eventually going to slide off into the ocean and raise global sea levels by about ten metres, d estroying a lot of sea-front real estate.
If the ice sheets were kind enough to melt in place this would take hundred s of years. When the Canadian ice sheet melted at the end of the last ice a ge, it slid into the sea in very large chunks indeed and the extra fresh wa ter that it dumped into the North Atlantic may have been what turned off th e Gulf Stream for 1300+/-70 years and caused the Younger Dryas - not an eve nt that we want repeated.
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This isn't an economic question, it's a survival question. The nastier side effects of anthropogenic global warming could be very nasty indeed. Becaus e predicting them involves looking a non-linear phenomena going in places t hat where we haven't got good access, the IPCC doesn't like talking about t hem - it sounds alarmist. This is unfortunate - the IPCC wasn't put in plac e to give politically palatable advice, but rather scientifically sound adv ice.
The disincentives are simpler - not reducing CO2 emissions is going to lead to 4C of global warming, sea level rise, climate change and a great deal m ore extreme weather.
There's nothing unknown about why it went wrong - industry was bribed with massive free off-sets and the GFC meant that they weren't using as much as everybody expected and sold off the spare offsets cheap.
Rubbish.
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Why? The denialist propaganda machine is the book's primary target. As Geor ge Monbiot pointed out in "Heat" rather earlier - in 2006 - some of the peo ple lying to us about anthropogenic global warming are the same people who were lying to us about the effects of tobacco smoke a decade or so earlier.
t.
But you can't post a link to this intrepid feat.
Do tell us why.
I read the paper, and it didn't look sloppy to me. Educate me about it's pr ocedural defects ...
"[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against t he way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."
Since a lot of the criticism he complains about is essentially lying-for-hi re, he might find the intolerance more understandable if he knew enough abo ut the technical facts to realise how crummy the criticisms were. "Merchant s of Doubt" makes no bones about how unsavoury the "criticism" of anthropog enic global warming can get. He's now 91 and a survivor from a very differe nt academic climate.
But The Heartlands Institute - amongst others - makes a business of generat ing invalid criticisms as public relations exercise for the benefit of the fossil-carbon extraction industry, who pay them to do it.
"Merchants of Doubt" explains why.
Why not? He objects to the tone of the debate, and doesn't address it's con tent.
I've yet to see a technical question he's produced.
"He believes that existing simulation models of climate fail to account for some important factors, and hence the results will contain too much error to reliably predict future trends."
In other words he wants to say that the current models can't work without e xplaining why, or coming up with something better. Elderly scientists are f ond of pontificating in that kind of way, and deserve to be shouted down wh en they do it.
the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burn ing of fossil fuels and other combustion processes were large enough to cau se global warming. In his calculation Arrhenius included the feedback from changes in water vapor as well as latitudinal effects, but he omitted cloud s, convection of heat upward in the atmosphere, and other essential factors . His work is currently seen less as an accurate prediction of global warmi ng than as the first demonstration that it should be taken as a serious pos sibility."
But it starts with Al Gore's
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which still reads well, and was deliberately written for the popular market . It isn't as dumbed down as much as "An Inconvient Truth" since it was aim ed a people who were willing to read an entire book.
The message is widely available. John Larkin's ignorance has to be delibera te - it keeps him out of arguments with right-wing nitwits.
But only after most of the fish had gone, and the fishermen had had their n oses rubbed in the obvious existence of a real problem.
They become a strange new species, imported from some place just over a bor der.
Not even close. I don't even think anyone in Florida is working on the sheer level of fraud from the spate of hurricanes there. The insurance companies just priced around it and stopped looking. People just pick the numbers htat support their hypothesis and run with 'em.
You can't even work out how far to lay off toxic mortgage debt, much less this. We know roughly "what"; anybody who says they know "how much" is most likely delusional. The over/under is massive.
All you can do is "short hydrocarbons", and that is basically insane until something makes it san(er).
This might make sense, but we can't get prediction markets much into anything they are not already in:
tmosphere, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are eventually going to slide off into the ocean and raise global sea levels by about ten metre s, destroying a lot of sea-front real estate.
Les Cargill snipped the above paragraph to allow himself to effectively cha nge the subject to insurance fraud in Florida
es/
In effect, Les Cargill doesn't want to think about what's likely to happen, and is burying his head in the small print.
Do you realize that your entire post is so full of assumptions that I can't even tell what you are talking about? I bet you don't even realize that you are making assumptions.
Well, i hate to tell you, but there is NO SUCH THING as "renewable" energy. Does not exist, cannot exist; look at the 3 laws of thermodynamics. One can only transform energy from one form to another - and at a loss. Even our sun which is the 99.9999999+ percent source (oil and coal indirectly contain "sun power") is running downhill, transforming energy from one form to another.
story with the way The IEEE Spectrum presented the same basic information.
ompetitive renewable electricity generating scheme had to produce electrici ty more cheaply than current generating plants do.
enerating plants don't pay anything to be allowed to dump CO2 into the atmo sphere - though it's obvious to everybody except denialists that this is im posing a cost on the rest of the world, and a cost that's becoming larger a s global warming gets worse.
on is a finite resource. We've already dug up the easily extracted reserves of fossil carbon, and every successive ton of carbon is going to be harder to dig out and correspondingly progressively more expensive.
nerating plants can store enough energy - as hot molten salt in big and wel l-insulated tanks - to provide "dispatchable" power.
per kilowatt-hour than photovoltaic generation, the fact that it was dispat chable, and available overnight, made it an essential - if minor - part of the mix.
ispatchable, but not enough of it do do anything like the whole job.
.
Because "renewable" isn't being used in the thermodyamic sense, but rather in the practical sense that sun-light, wind-power and rain are going to be here tomorrow, and coal and oil aren't - for a fairly wide range of "tomorr ows".
The sun is going to be churning out similar number of photons every day for the next five billion years, and turning some of them into electricity isn 't going to contribute to global warming.
Why term "renewable" got popular for solar, wind and hydro-electric power e scapes me, but getting upset because popular usage reflects a defective und erstanding of thermodynamics is something of a waste of time and energy.
he presentation, and answering questions afterwards, and she did deem to kn ow what she was talking about.
ions > > > > > than a NASCAR on Swiss cheese. It's juvenile.
r than specialists.
Perhaps not all that useful - you do tend to be remarkably incredulous abo ut politically inconvenient facts.
rescue.
ve fallen for the denialist propaganda and don't show any sign of the capac ity for critical thinking required to peel off the flim-flam.
You do like to think that. Just because the Koch brothers have invested a l ot with The Heartland Institute to persuade you to think that way doesn't a ctually mean that what you believe is correct. It may be far-right certifie d, but it's still nuts.
It's more that you've been Koched than that I've been Grubered.
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Al Gore has done a respectable job of popularising the accepted scientific case. The fact that he's a Democrat politician is all you need to know to d istrust him. In order to distrust the science he's popularised you have to pretend to believe an absurd conspiracy theory where 95% of the world's cli matologists have got together to defraud the grant-giving agencies by inven ting anthropogenic global warming - ignoring the fact that the Koch brother s pay more generously for rather less self-consistent constructions.
ust
165 Gwh per year - and the molten salt heat storage tanks only store about
7.5 hours worth of bridging generation, but the first unit has been running since 2009.
e thermal time constant of the heat storage tanks is rather shorter than it would be for larger tanks.
ime.
but
.
Q.E.D.
Demonstrating what? That your immediate environment is shrouded in delibera te obscurity?
You could build something useful further inland where there's less sea mist - not down-wind of your smoke and mirrors - and hook it up with a modern h igh voltage link, like the one the Germans have in mind to build to link th eir hypothetical solar power stations in the Sahara back to the fatherland.
If it's possible everywhere, it has to be possible everywhere. Which it isn't.
OTOH you claim universal 'renewable' energy is possible, even demonstrated by pilots. When I cite a place where it isn't--representing a large part of the U.S.--you reply 'why of course it isn't possible *there*,' blissfully unaware of the painful contradiction.
out 165 Gwh per year - and the molten salt heat storage tanks only store ab out 7.5 hours worth of bridging generation, but the first unit has been run ning since 2009.
d the thermal time constant of the heat storage tanks is rather shorter tha n it would be for larger tanks.
of
it,
n't > > > > > work.
berate obscurity?
What a fatuous claim. There are good and bad places for wind farms and sola r plants, just as there are for hydro-electric plants - though rather more for the former than the latter.
d
of
You claim that your "there" is representative of the whole of the USA - whi ch doesn't happen to be true. Even if it were a median location - and no su n for six weeks sounds atypically bad - there are still plenty of better in solated areas.
You certainly don't need to cover the whole the country with solar collecto rs to generate enough electric power to replace the current coal, oil and g as-powered electricity generating plant, and there are enough places that a re suitable to replace the lot and leave room for expansion. You may need b etter long distance transmission lines to do what the Germans have plans to do in the Sahara, but there are strong arguments for covering Nevada with solar collectors - just to annoy Jim Thompson, for a start.
There are times when your debating habits become at little too transparent. Making an absurdly general claim might have go down well in a high school debates, but it just looks like half-baked showing off to even marginally m ore sophisticated audiences. You've spent too much time with the kinds of m orons who can take the Tea Party seriously and swallow their ignorant guff.
I've been posting lists like that here for years. Glad you've finally caught up. Progress.
Your *own reference* cites life style factors as important to heart disease , the leading cause of death. The same life style factors also contribute dramatically to cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, vascular dementia, and kidney disease, the other leading causes of death.
Lifestyle choices *matter*.
list of excuses is "accident" which causes 5.02% of deaths in the US. Sinc e it is the leading cause of death from ages 1-44 is does have a disproport ionate effect on life expectancy.
m falls at the first hurdle.
If the Australian cause-of-death figures aren't comparable, *your* claim (that life expectancy projections based on them are comparable) fails.
rom accidents as whole, and show them as causing only half the death rate - about 2.3%. There aren't enough other accidental deaths for them to get li sted. Suicide does show up - which it doesn't on the US lists, probably bec ause US medical people have the old-fashioned habit of lying about it to sp are the relatives.
ng
parisons are possible.
You just said above that the cause-of-death stats comprising the LE projections *aren't* comparable.
It's amazing this stuff isn't obvious, and that intelligent people still use LE *projections* as a proxy for medical quality. It's truly the gull's proxy.
The information has been widely available for a lot longer any of us has be en posting here. So that fact that you've finally noticed that I'm aware of it might be progress. Real progress would involve you understanding what i t meant, rather than posting a mis-representation to score a rhetorical poi nt.
se,
,
Sure, and lots of them are pretty much made for you by the society into whi ch you are born. Obesity is more socially acceptable in the USA than it is in most societies.
ur list of excuses is "accident" which causes 5.02% of deaths in the US. Si nce it is the leading cause of death from ages 1-44 is does have a dispropo rtionate effect on life expectancy.
aim falls at the first hurdle.
Since I never made any such claim, the failure is all yours - which you mig ht have noticed, if you'd read what I wrote.
from accidents as whole, and show them as causing only half the death rate - about 2.3%. There aren't enough other accidental deaths for them to get listed. Suicide does show up - which it doesn't on the US lists, probably b ecause US medical people have the old-fashioned habit of lying about it to spare the relatives.
wing
omparisons are possible.
I've never said that they were. Life expectancy tables don't include cause of death data. The national statistics from which life expectancies are der ived do generally include cause of death data, but since the cause of death data isn't directly comparable from one country to another your spurious a rgument about why Americans die younger than the inhabitants of 33 other co untries was just your usual smoke and mirrors.
's
Nobody is using life expectancy "projections" as a proxy for medical qualit y. They use life expectancy data - listed for people who have already died
- as a crude indicator of medical quality. If you've got a better one, tell us about it. Infant mortality is another popular proxy, and the US does ba dly there too.
You are indulging in your usual American exceptionalism flim-flam - if you don't like the result you concoct a nonsense argument, and when you get cal led on it, you try to move the goal-posts. In this particular case you want ed to explain away America's depressingly low life expectancy figures with the following densely statistical argument
"If you're not in a gang, didn't die from being born 1/4 weight to a Great Society teen mom, avoid fatally wrecking your car in your teens, and don't get killed in a war, you're better off here."
None of the causes of death advanced come remotely close to explaining the US life expectancy short-fall, and you do know enough to have been aware th at you were consciously trying to mislead your readers.
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