Sachs’ WSJ Challenge
Jeffery Sachs of the Columbia Earth Institute has an excellent commentary in Scientific American this month on the disconnect between the Wall Street Journal editorial board and their own reporters (and the rest of the world) when it comes to climate change. He challenges them to truly follow their interest in an "open-minded search for scientific knowledge" by meeting with the "world's leading climate scientists and to include in that meeting any climate-skeptic scientists that that the Journal editorial board would like to invite".
RealClimate heartily endorses such an approach and, while we leave it to others to judge who the 'world leading' authorities are, we'd certaintly be willing to chip in if asked. To those who would decry this as a waste of time, we would point to The Economist who recently produced a very sensible special on global warming and proposed a number of economically viable ways to tackle it, despite having been reflexively denialist not that many years ago. If the Economist can rise to the challenge, maybe there is hope for the Wall Street Journal….
19 September 2006 at 10:10 AM
Good luck. Their editorial board, by the accounts I’ve read (I don’t read the WSJ editorial page) is exquisitely starkers. Just 180 degrees from their news organization. It’s one of the most fascinating, disturbing, depressing phenomenon in the modern world.
19 September 2006 at 10:10 AM
I admire your optimism, but I can’t share it. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal routinely denies what is reported on its news pages, and not just in the realm of science. I don’t think they are so foolish as to believe what they say, which leaves only one other possibility.
19 September 2006 at 10:27 AM
It is a good initiative, and definately worth doing. But I think it is pretty hard to be as deep in denial as they are unless you *really* do NOT want to know. So I would be surprised if the offer were accepted.
–PLUG–
There is an interesting movie on Global Warming coming to the US soon (in time for the elections) called The Great Warming
(brief description and links to film websites in above link)
–/PLUG–
RC, they claim consultations with top climatologists, any names from this establishment?
19 September 2006 at 10:28 AM
I applaud your willingness to participate in the discussions if they ever take place. (Though I think you’re being too modest about your own standing in the climate debate.) There is no guarantee that a discussion will open any minds (some of the minds on WSJ editorial board seem to be rusted soundly shut), but without dialog there is little hope of progress.
Thank you, and all of the contributors, for your work with this site. It’s on my daily ‘must-read’ list.
19 September 2006 at 10:29 AM
Excellent news! All along at the WSJ, a factual problem has been the editorial board’s ignorance of what the paper’s own reporters report, but an even bigger problem has been the editorial board’s journalistic practice, their unwillingness to invite and conduct an open, honest discussion.
Science’s obviously needed response to that practice is simply to offer continually, wherever and whenever possible, to have science’s best climate minds participate, if the WSJ will only open up what it has closed off.
(That response is obviously needed despite the “pristine” — remember that word from earlier RC discussions on this? — reality-blind scientists who, as Gavin accurately predicts, will “decry this as a waste of time.”)
The WSJ editorial board can dodge facts, but it can’t forever dodge its journalistic obligation to conduct open and honest discussion of facts.
So I hope RC readers will contact the WSJ editorial board with requests not just to get the climate science right, but to get the journalistic practice right.
The WSJ editorial board — especially James Taranto (James.Taranto@wsj.com), who writes “Best of the Web” online — ought at least to answer what’s being charged against them. It’s one thing to disagree with the climate consensus, but it’s quite another to deny the WSJ editorial board’s readers access to a decent discussion of it.
19 September 2006 at 10:37 AM
I will join with others and say this sounds like a great idea. I especially like the idea of including skeptics. However I am afraid that I am reminded of the old saying “you can lead a horse to water …”.
Its probably worth doing since you can at least continue to point to the offer. Kind of like the “bet on global warming” test that few skeptics are willing to take.
19 September 2006 at 10:54 AM
I’m curious what WSJ people would have to say about a Sept 17 article in The Post. I didn’t like the last couple paragraphs - about the text of an e-mail sent out last week to other state climatologists … (which) came as state climatologists and their staff debated whether to issue a “letter of support” for Michaels. “Regardless of your views on climate change, Pat Michaels is one of us,” …
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/16/AR2006091600644.html
or http://tinyurl.com/eh6u4
State Climatologists and their staffs have had close working relationships with National Weather Service people, which explains the downplaying on global warming science by both groups of public servants.
19 September 2006 at 11:25 AM
Sorry to post twice so quickly, but another blog (The Washington Monthly) is reporting the rumor that The Big Cheese himself is preparing an about face on Global Warming. The speculated date and speculated venue of this speculated change is next January’s State of the Union address. A Bush reversal would definitely give those whose skepticism is grounded in political considerations a graceful, public way out of their intransigence.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_09/009522.php
19 September 2006 at 11:56 AM
I’m with John Cross on this one - 99.5% of the time (.01 confidence, >80% probability, data available at my FTP) you aren’t going to change someone’s mind. But the upside will be the “big tent” offer, the fact that you will be keeping your
enemiesfriends close by to see where they are getting their latest information, and lastly it will be harder for the editorial board to prevaricate with someone looking over their shoulder (making them work for their money, IOW).Best,
D
19 September 2006 at 1:23 PM
It’s naive to believe that the WSJ editorial staff is ignorant about the state of the science regarding AGW.
The Economist has a level of integrity not shared by the WSJ’s editorial staff.
A debate such as that being proposed would be like a creationist vs. biologist debate. The biologist displays his or her knowledge and makes the creationist look foolish. The creationist declares victory, and the fundy press touts the result to the world.
Replace “creationist” with “AGW denialist”, “biologist” with “climate scientist”, and “fundy press” with “WSJ editorial board” and there you go …
19 September 2006 at 1:58 PM
Re #7,
came as state climatologists and their staff debated whether to issue a “letter of support” for Michaels. “Regardless of your views on climate change, Pat Michaels is one of us,”
But is he?
19 September 2006 at 2:36 PM
Re#6
“I will join with others and say this sounds like a great idea. I especially like the idea of including skeptics. However I am afraid that I am reminded of the old saying “you can lead a horse to water …”.
Or how about the Dorothy Parker quote …
“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”
I think this one is more apt, frankly.
19 September 2006 at 3:14 PM
Excuse me for the hijack gavin but this a must read:
A climate satellite is built and paid for. ………The Ukrainian government offered to launch DSCOVR free of charge, France made a similar offer. But NASA’s response so far has been “no thanks.”….. The mission was quietly killed this year, so the satellite is sitting in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center.
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/free_dscovr.php
I could not imagine a stronger smoking gun of the political suppression of science.
[Response: I’m not personally familiar with this controversy, however, you should bear in mind that the biggest cost in all of these missions are not the launches, but the ongoing retrieval and processing of data once the satellite is launched. It is these costs that are most likely the sticking point. Remember there is no such thing as a free launch…. - gavin]
19 September 2006 at 3:55 PM
I think it is a good idea and worth trying. However they may choose not to address the science. I do not closely follow the WSJ editorial board but I did see a recent editorial where they criticized the new climate change law in California. In it they expressed skepticism about global warming but focussed their energy decrying the new law by minimizing the impact California could have acting alone and warned of the costs to California consumers and businesses. And of course they dragged out the boogeyman of rising emissions from China.
RealClimate would know more about this than me but I get the impression that the community of deniers have moved on from directly confronting the science because it is clear they have lost that battle. If the WSJ editorial board approach to the California law is any guide (I have seen other examples of this), the new strategy seems to be to compare any incremental solution such as the California law to an idealized immediate global solution. The deniers then find the incremental solution inadequate and therefore not worth doing. In case their first argument hasn’t convinced you they follow that up with a horror story about what it would cost but of course fail to even acknowledge the cost of not addressing climate change.
I would not trust the WSJ editorial board to stick to the agenda you would like to talk about.
19 September 2006 at 3:58 PM
Not very significant or surprising, most editorial boards differ from their reporters in most newspapers, except most editorial boards are even more radical left wing enviro-kooks that the reporters, as hard as that is to believe.
19 September 2006 at 4:03 PM
Actually, it seems as if that satellite was controversial since it’s inception. There seems to be conflicting reports on the Internet. Some call it a “Gore-camera” and a waste because of his feel-good “look at the earth from the Internet” scheme. Is this satellite critical for climate science or not? Just how well will this measure the energy budget? And won’t you need these measurements over a long period of time to make any use of the data?
19 September 2006 at 4:17 PM
> 13, Triana — previously discussed here.
http://www.realclimate.org/wp-comments-popup.php?p=350&c=1#comment-19170
has a search result for link to earlier and longer RC discussion.
19 September 2006 at 5:25 PM
Gavin wrote:
The problem is that the editorial staff of The Wall Street Journal has no “interest” in an “open-minded search for scientific knowledge”. They have an interest in rapacious greed. They are bought-and-paid-for propagandists. They don’t write the things they do because they believe them to be true, and there is zero chance that they will be persuaded to “change their minds” or change what they write as a result of reviewing the scientific evidence. They are already well aware of the scientific evidence that anthropogenic global warming is real. That’s precisely the reason that they go to such elaborately dishonest lengths to convince their readers otherwise. They write the things they do in a deliberate, carefully scripted effort to deceive the public, in the interest of maintaining and increasing the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful fossil fuel corporations.
[Response: The point of such challenges is partly to test whether a self -professed desire for an “open-minded search for scientific knowledge” is genuine or not. I doubt very much that the WSJ will take up Sachs’ offer, but it’s important to make it obvious that they won’t, and who knows, maybe they’ll surprise us. I’m thinking about writing about the Economist’s transformation to see if there might be some lessons - I advise comparing the 1997 link from them (above) to any recent WSJ editorial. They’re really not so different. - gavin]
19 September 2006 at 6:02 PM
Re #11, … “Pat Michaels is one of us,”
Coby … But is he?
If “state climatologists and their staff debated whether to issue a “letter of support” for Michaels” … knowing how their debate went might explain if he is or is not one of them.
19 September 2006 at 6:31 PM
The point of such challenges is partly to test whether a self -professed desire for an “open-minded search for scientific knowledge” is genuine or not.
Indeed. So how about you demonstrate your openminded credentials, Gavin, and take up a more relevant challenge: give us a cost benefit analysis of *not* implementing Kyoto.
19 September 2006 at 7:11 PM
True, The Economist has done an excellent job of prioritizing where alledged AGW fits in the grand scheme of things, I definitely recommend the latest 2006 Copenhagen Consensus documents to you all, that is the kind of thing the WSJ does well, and of course this blog and scientists do poorly. Take a look if you dare, to see how puny and low priority possible AGW really is among real problems, it might reduce some of the excessive hubris I read here.
[Response: I’m not sure how often we need to state this, but prioritising tasks and allocating resources is a political function, not a scientific one. However, political decisions should be made in the full light of all available information - if potential costs are being ignored (’externalised’) then no sensible C/B analysis can be done. However, economic parlour games like the Copenhagen Consensus do not come close to offering a useful analysis of the situation - too short a horizon and too limited an imagination. -gavin]
19 September 2006 at 8:10 PM
While James Taranto and John Fund don’t have college degrees, both “attended” Cal State, even in journalism they still feel qualified to call top scientists “jokers on the take” on global warming. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. They won’t change. Their’s is to mock from ignorance. They’re stooges.
19 September 2006 at 8:19 PM
I am glad that Sachs had made this challenge but count me among those who don’t believe the WSJ editorial page is interested in the pursuit of truth. It is not like AGW is just a singular case for them…They are viciously anti-environment and will use whatever arguments are necessary to push their agenda. I think the WSJ editorial page will come around about the same time the Competitive Enterprise Institute does.
19 September 2006 at 8:55 PM
Having written Wall Street Journal op-eds , may I observe that the disparity you note is symptomatic of a problem that extends far beyond it. While the WSJ no longer has a Science Editor, such Beltway must-reads as The Washington Times ,The Weekly Standard and National Review have never had any to begin with. To compound this bipartisan problem neither have The New Republic or The Nation.
Let me therefore adduce a truly contrarian hypothesis: the problem at hand is the deplorable lack of politicized science in partisan journals –it cannot fairly be said to exist unless both sides have some inkling of what it is they are trying to politicize.
As long the PR perpetrating classes prefer propagating hype as recieved wisdom to raise ratings , the public will be their lawful prey, whether it’s Al Gore fast-forwarding sea level rise or 20/20 trying to resuscitate nuclear winter.
Having known Sin at Hiroshima, science was bound to run into advertising sooner or later.
19 September 2006 at 10:06 PM
Re #21 (and the response to #21):
Modelling the costs and ‘good’ or ‘proper’ responses to global warming is extremely complex (just like any social policy) and shallow and simplified games like the Copenhagen Consensus just don’t cut it. Not only must ALL costs and ALL benefits be examined, but you must look at every possibility (or at least every plausible solution). Personally, I feel that the best solutions aren’t even brought up to the table as many good and comprehensive solutions are based on sociology and psychology, not economics, and they probably require fundamental changes in how society operates.
As an example, why isn’t reducing or eliminating marketing (and consumerism) brought up as an idea? Marketing (IE., TV advertising, fancy product boxes, viral marketing, telemarketing, junk mail, marketing-based product design, industry promotion, product placement, free samples, certain aspects of trademarks, etc.) creates desires and ‘needs’ that need not exist. The way I see it, creating a need for new windows by smashing all the windows in the neighborhood (obviously vandalism) is no worse than creating a ‘need’ for golf courses, Pokemon cards, large cars, addictive drugs, or even empires and war - the end effect is more resources spent and a decrease in happiness (the decrease occurs because not everyone can pay the price, and even those that can expend substantial effort meeting the new ‘needs’). That marketing adds to global warming and plenty of other externalities (via extra economic activity and reduced efficiency) only makes the whole equation worse.
Lastly, just because an idea isn’t the best idea around doesn’t mean it should be ignored. Every proposal that has a total benefit higher than the total cost is a worthy proposal that will make humans better off than the status quo, and that should not be forgotten. There’s also no reason that programs cannot be done in parallel and it would be stupid not to do so. In the case of global warming, any social engineering based approaches (ie., demand reduction) would act synergistically with energy efficiency and renewable energy based approaches.
19 September 2006 at 10:10 PM
re 24.
Russell Seitz,
It’s more than what you said in 24. Propagating a controversy on global warming science for rating purposes wouldn’t work for the WSJ if we took away the two large groups of public servants who’ve been on the same team with the skeptics (see #7).
20 September 2006 at 12:48 AM
Re: #7
Michaels views don’t seem out of that out of line with the consensus: “His position is that the climate is becoming warmer, but it will not turn out to be as hot — or its consequences as bad — as some fear.”
Similarly, Taylor of Oregon seems spot on the current state science: “Taylor acknowledges that the Earth is warming but says it is impossible to calculate how much of that is caused by human activity.”
Has anyone calculated how much of that is caused by human activity? In which journals? Using which models? I suspect the mixed GHG proportion is somewhere between 20% and 60%, with internal climate modes and solar variation the leading candidates for the rest. I doubt anyone has made a case for high accuracy in attribution in peer reviewed journals that can stand up to scrutiny.
[Response: You are not even remotely correct in any of the above statements. Natural radiative forcing (solar+volcanic) actually leads to a net cooling over the 20th century, and the remaining (internal) natural variability could not possibly account for the late 20th century warming. Before spouting nonsense, I suggest you at least aquaint yourself with the basics. You might start with the detection and attribution chapter of the IPCC (2001) report. - mike]
The models and data are not yet up to this task, and may never be, given the accuracy which which we might have to know the climate previous to the recent warming in order to properly represent climate commitment. Even the earlier levels of forcing can never be recovered with sufficient accuracy, it does not mean we won’t be able to validate the models for projective purposes with the aid of a few more years of accurate data, and, of course, with the necessary model improvements.
[Response: It’s odd, but the desire for a fixed percentage of what the attribution to solar, or GHGs are to current warming (or the greenhouse effect is in general) is much more prevelant on discussion boards than in the literature or at scientific conferences. The reasons why it’s difficult and a little ill-defined are that a) prior to the satellite era some important forcings become more uncertain (particularly aerosols and solar), b) we still have uncertainty in the climate sensitivity (and some variation in the efficacy of various forcings, and most importantly, c) because there is a mix of warming and cooling effects, an ‘attribution’ defined as the expected delta T due to GHGs divided by the actual delta T will give more than 100%! A better definition might be to estimate it as delta T (GHGs)/ (total delta T from all warming forcings) - i.e. of all the forces making the planet warmer, what percent are GHGs. Alternatively, you could lump all anthropogenic forcings together vs natural forcings, but there too, since most estimates of the total ‘natural’ response (from solar + volcanoes) give a late 20th C cooling, you would get an anthropogenic attribution of more than 100% again. This might be worth exploring in a full post… - gavin]
20 September 2006 at 1:00 AM
Congrats to Jeffrey Sachs on the idea of a debate, will be looking forward to see if WSJ is inclined to release itself from its shackles of ignorance.
On a lighter note, there is nothing more sexy for business than a solar panel, a thing of beauty if well placed, a total renewable energy package, a money saver, a small perpetual oil well, I kind of think that the business world has lost their edge perhaps because business people read the wrong papers.
20 September 2006 at 1:51 AM
Re 25
Mr. Neuman:
In my experience neocons are giddy creatures, and it can take some serious carrot dangling to get them to even nibble on scientific evidence - one can but try-
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2006/09/greenlands_ungr.html
20 September 2006 at 8:57 AM
Re Jeffrey Davis comment 8, one should of course be careful with rumours (in this case, The Washington Monthly picked up the story from a UK journalist I had alerted to an article in Platts that had been forwarded by someone else - see http://jebin08.blogspot.com/2006/09/climate-uk-numbers-and-us-rumours.html ). That said, I for one would be interested to see more informed comment on the implications of targets such as 450ppm by 2050 and 2106.
20 September 2006 at 9:39 AM
Re: responses to #27
Mike, I not only have read the 2001 attribution section, but also participated in the lastest draft review. Combining solar and volcanic forcings is a red herring, when the question is what proportion increases in solar activity and forcing is responsible for the 20th century warming and particularly the recent warming vis’a'vis anthropogenic GHGs. Solar forcing has increased over the 20th century and given that the oceans have not yet had time to equilibrate to the new levels of forcing, it must have contributed some to the recent warming, in fact, that equlibration was further delayed by the cooling period, so the unrealized climate commitment would have been greater than ordinarily expected given that most of the increase in solar activity occurred in the first half of the century.
[Response: Thats enough of this nonsense. We’ve discussed this ad nauseum in past posts. The trend in natural radiative forcing during the 20th century is negative. If you’ve got something new to add to the discussion, fine. Otherwise, don’t bother posting this stuff. - mike]
Gavin is on the right track with identifying the issues: “delta T (GHGs)/ (total delta T from all warming forcings) - i.e. of all the forces making the planet warmer, what percent are GHGs.” especially, since deltaT is specified, which would presumably incorporate any difference in climate sensitivity to the different forcings.
Mike’s statement that internal variation could not possibly have caused the recent warming is also a red herring. It doesn’t not have to have caused it to be significant. Even a 10% to 15% contribution is significant, and I would add that term to the denominator that Gavin has proposed. We need models that can reproduce multidecadal climate modes to properly attribute this, and given that we know the current ocean state much better than the past states, any hopes of recovering this figure probably requires running the models in reverse.
Models that attribute 100% of the recent warming to anthropogenic GHGs are likely to give erroneously high projections based on the projections of higher GHG scenerios.
20 September 2006 at 9:53 AM
The #2 priority of the Copenhagen Consensus–Water Supply and Sanitation–is a climate change issue. 1.8 billion people currently don’t have access to reliable, safe water sources. Most of these people live in arid, lower latitude regions which will likely dry out as the globe warms. I’ve always been perplexed by the decoupling of the climate change issue with world water supply problem.
20 September 2006 at 10:23 AM
Re #32:
Water supply is primarily a land use issue and only secondarily a climate change issue. Issues like depleting fossil aquifers, building cities in deserts, and wasteful irrigation practices have nothing to do with climate change. Even desertification is due in large part to deforestation, overgrazing, poor agricultural practices, and other land use issues.
20 September 2006 at 10:57 AM
RE #27 & #31:
The niggling arguments about exactly what portion of global warming can be attributed to anthropogenic causes are appalling. It’s analogous to dealing with a house fire by arguing about how the fire started and whether it will take two hours or three hours to burn the house down. First priority is to control the fire.
We are facing a global crisis. Certainly serious, possibly catastrophic. Mankind’s activities, including burning fossil fuels, are exacerbating (and almost certainly causing) the crisis so we need to change our ways. This is not an intellectual exercise. This is survival.
And Crocodile Hunter, unless YOU can present a convincing analysis that a 4 - 6 meter sea level rise won’t be catastrophic, please go troll elsewhere. Your repetitive posts just make you appear chuckleheaded.
20 September 2006 at 11:38 AM
Have to diagree that climate is only a secondary component of water issues. Sure land use is a huge part of it, but every drought, regardless of the use of bmps, has a climatic component. Even areas without development experience drought. I dig integrated water resource management as much as the next guy, but supply-side issues are going grow as time goes on.
20 September 2006 at 11:47 AM
Colorado State professor disputes global warming is human-caused
Global warming is happening, but humans are not the cause, one of the nation’s top experts on hurricanes said Monday morning.
http://www.reporterherald.com/Top-Story.asp?ID=6894
[Response: Ah…. If only every one of my public lectures got as much press as Bill Gray’s….. Unfortunately, Gray’s conviction that he is right is just not supported by any actual evidence (peer reviewed paper anyone?). Sure it’s good for challenges to be made, but for them to have any traction in the real scientific debate (as opposed to the media debate) they need published support - and here he is woefully lacking. - gavin]
[Response: As soon as a contrarian trots out that favorite of all specious arguments “how can we model climate change when we can’t predict the weather 10 days from now?”, they’ve ceased constructive engagement and are not worth listening to any longer. - mike]
20 September 2006 at 12:15 PM
I haven’t read all the comments. I started to read Mr. Sach’s article “Fiddling While the Planet Burns” His first line “Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.” As always I was immediately turned off by so called scientists who try to make uneducated people like me believe that now every heat wave, drought, flood and hurricane (to name only a few) is caused by a one degree rise in global temperature . You guys say you want to talk about just the science, why not try that, maybe we do have sense enough to understand the facts rather than wonder if we should be scared to death.
20 September 2006 at 1:35 PM
True Milton, perhaps this blog could trot out all those scientists from last year for the WSJ experts(many from Ga. Tech. as I remember, and yelling and trying to shout down Bill Gray and Max Mayfield at AMS as they disagreed with them as I recall), you know the ones who claimed Katrina and the larger than average 2005 hurricane season was caused by AGW. So what do they say this year? Oh, I know, one year of odd weather proves nothing, funny, that’s what Bill and Max and the skeptics said last year that got them demonized. Try again AGW “believers”, your faith has holes in it and is sinking.
20 September 2006 at 3:11 PM
re: 38. No. Please read the peer-reviewed scientific literature. It has shown that there will always be some natural influences that affect hurricane formation but that the baseline numbers have been raised over previous decades. Furthermore, hurricane formation trends is just one of the oh so many indicators of anthropogenic global warming. You can read about many of them on this web site.
We have a developing El Nino (warming waters of the equatorial Pacific) which enhances upper level wind shear in the Atlantic. That shear is often largely responsible for the relatively fewer hurricanes. Such as this season. One season does not make a trend.
Narrow focus, cherry-picking, and personal attacks such as accusing scientific data and reproducable results to be “faith” do absolutely nothing to show that the peer-reviewed science behind climate change is not sound.
20 September 2006 at 3:39 PM
Re mike’s response about predicting climate.
I have been thinking about suitable answers to that question ever since Rasmus started his thread that is now closed. Yesterday I was reading Poincare (in Ian Stewart’s book “Does God Play Dice”) and the answer suddenly came to me:-)
The excerpt that Stewart includes is from Poincare’s essay “Chance”. He compares weather prediction with roulette since both are deterministic but appear to be random. (This was long before Ed Lorentz!) That gave me the idea
We cannot predict where the next throw of the roulette ball will land, but we do know that the house will make a profit. We may not know what the weather will be in one week’s time, but we do know that if we increase the greenhouse gases then it will be hotter. That is like the house taking a larger share of our stakes by upping the odds. We know we will lose
What do you think?
20 September 2006 at 5:07 PM
Interesting start to the thread and comments.
I agree with Gavin on keeping things open and transparent.
I have been a reader of The Economist for many years now, often frustratingly so but it always keeps me on my toes. One does need to look at the overall internal management structure of the journal to understand how it functions. I do not have the link, but for subscribers to the journal there is always the Barbara Smith retirement article on-line which describes the process of editorial decisions and in particular the fights on difficult issues : in her article there were two, Vietnam and Iraq, both of which The Economist got wrong and to its credit the journal now admits perhaps that their view on Iraq should have been a little more mature.
On Climate, they were a denier and even supported Mr Lomburg : I don’t see that support currently, indeed the journal should be congratulated for getting the Climate issue right.
Some posters have already commented on the divergence of the WSJ Editorial from the main body of the newspaper. It is no different in The Economist indeed sometimes I wonder if the Editor has been reading his/her own reporters. But in general, views do cohere.
I would agree with the poster who talks about the journal’s integrity. A lot of clever people work there : you might be interested to know that the last two specials on Global Warming and Globalisation were both edited by women and in my view represented good and fair reporting.
So far as cost benefit analysis is concerned I agree with Gavin that it’s a fair start provided both costs and benefits are properly identified. There is a paper by two economists from Norway which does the maths and takes things on a bit further than Mr Lomburg’s mob and I posted on this some time ago. The point I always make about Mr Lomburg is that he is a bad and biased reporter of his own events.
20 September 2006 at 5:26 PM
RE: #40 - I think your analogy is weak. From a standpoint of systems theory, you are comparing apples and oranges.
20 September 2006 at 5:42 PM
I see everywhere the assumption that this Atlantic hurricane season is below average. But see table 1 on this page, which displays the progression that one would expect from an average of the 1944 - 2005 seasons.
By this date (September 20), the expected activity is:
7 named systems (of tropical storm strength)
3 (nearly 4) hurricanes
1 (nearly 2) major hurricanes.
The actual activity:
8 named systems -> above average
4 hurricanes -> average
2 major hurricanes -> average
I think a bit of caution is in order; While it is possible that the oncoming El Nino will dampen Atlantic hurricane activity enough to result in a below average final season tally (as some have forecast), the present tally is so far close to average.
20 September 2006 at 5:50 PM
re: 43. Your point is well-taken, thanks. Indeed, it may well be that the developing El Nino has influenced and somewhat lessened the tropical activity this year and yet it is still a season that is close to the average, rather than being below average as one might expect.
20 September 2006 at 5:51 PM
re 33.
For mountain snowmelt runoff, climate is the primary issue for water supply. Recent snow seasons have been dominated by lighter and less reliable water supplies from snowmelt.
In the Great Plains states snow periods have been shorter. Winter and spring evaporation and transpiration rates have been increasing. Large parts of the are is experiencing severe drought.
In the Upper Midwest, low water in 2006 is a big problem in northern and central Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, the U.P. of Michigan and Lake Michigan.
Water supply may have seemed like it was primarily a land use issue in the past.
20 September 2006 at 6:26 PM
Re 42 Steve, I don’t think I explaine my ideas very well let me try again.
What Poincare is arguing is that if we could measure the speed of the the croupiers hand and the speed and position of the roulette wheel, then we could calculate into which slot the ball would eventually rest. Because the calculations (and measurements) are impractical we say each throw is random.
Similarly, with the weather. If we could make enough measurements and enough caculations then we could calculate the weather. Poincare was writing in the 19th century before computers were widespread. Of couse now we can predict the weather, but we still think of much of it as random.
Consider roulette again. We know on average the way that the ball will fall into the pockets. For instance just less than half of throws will end in red pockets and similarly for black pockets. 1/37 of the times the ball will fall in the 0 pocket. So we know the house has an advantage of 2.3% and we can calculate how fast we will lose money. If you go to the USA, there is an additional 00 pocket so the house has an advantage of 5.3%, and we will lose money much faster. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roulette#Types_of_Roulette
Similarly we know that on average the greenhouse effect is 33K degrees. If we double the CO2 concentration then the greenhouse effect and global tempertures will increase just as the odds do when you add another zero pocket to a roulette wheel. We can calculate the odds, even if we can’t predict the next number. And we can calculate the temperture rise even if we can’t predict tomorrow’s temperature.
NB Temperatures and temperature rises are not the same things, even though they are measured with the same units. Temperature rises can be added. Adding tempertures is meaningless. It does not make sense to add the temperature of New York to that of London. So even though we cannot calculate a temperture, we can calculate a temperature rise.
20 September 2006 at 6:37 PM
“The system could right itself or spin out of human control.”
The above from the Economist commentary. But perhaps one can question the implied premise, that the ’system’ is or ever was under human control. Though I have no idea, as a layman, if the impulse which has been imparted to the global climate system can be modified, I suspect that scientists can’t answer that question either. Before nations are willing to apply presumed solutions to the problem of global warming, they will have to be convinced, if only psychologically, that remedies exist which are not simply desperate expedients.
20 September 2006 at 8:38 PM
re 29. 7.
Mr. Seitz,
One example of the second large groups of public servants on the same team with the skeptics had some discussion published below.
Excerpts from August 9, 2006 Juneau Empire article:
… “Tom Ainsworth, a panelist and the meteorologist in charge of the Juneau Weather Forecast Office. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Ainsworth said, adding that the planet continuously goes through climate-change cycles. “It’s a natural thing. But if we can use our information of these cycles to improve our lifestyle, then I think we should.” …
http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/080906/loc_20060809027.shtml
Some additional background material from an April 9, 2006 Juneau Empire searched article is shown below.
My questions - What are the Panel’s policy proposals up to this point? How did they arrive at them?
This winter Mayor Bruce Botelho appointed a panel of local scientists to gather the best data available about the warming trend and its present and possible future consequences for Juneau. The idea is for Juneau to become “more informed about this global phenomenon that is also happening in our backyard,” Botelho said last week. The panel’s work began a few weeks ago. It is expected to last at least six months and result in policy proposals and town meetings.
…
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClimateArchive/message/3640
20 September 2006 at 9:00 PM
In response to Gavin (Item 21), prioritising tasks and allocating resources are indeed ultimately political decisions. But such decisions are best if they are what is termed evidence-based decisions. These are based on quantification and, to achieve this, marshal and use the relevant body of scientific knowledge.
I have attempted this approach for the question of the full mitigation of global warming and other global risks in my recent paper in Futures.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6V65-4J616R4-5-8&_cdi=5805&_user=10&_orig=browse&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F2006&_sk=999619992&view=c&wchp=dGLbVtb-zSkzk&md5=0c580a6a9fdf006d453eb7a22ccc0cfd&ie=/sdarticle.pdfThe
I can also provide the pdf by email (m.leggett@griffith.edu.au)
My results come out very differently from those of the Copenhagen Consensus.
20 September 2006 at 9:35 PM
From 2003, an attempt to sum up why this is hard to think about:
http://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/cloudyskies.shtml
20 September 2006 at 10:23 PM
FYI to all:
Our government just released the US Climate Technology Technology Program Strategic Plan, at
www.climatetechnology.gov/stratplan/final
A quick glance shows a thorough summary of technology steps, using all the “stabilization wedges”: efficiency, renewables, CCS, nuclear, and fusion. I didn’t see an implementation plan yet. (The summary mentions voluntary measures and market forces, of course.) This will take time to digest.
20 September 2006 at 11:59 PM
#36, Kate Martin of the Herald might have wanted to put Gray’s tropical storm forecast batting record , taking quite the hit this year, especially from his forecast at the onset of the season. But there would not be a story with him because of such an ominous failure. Roger did good though, I appreciate a lot more his views, but he should point out another contrarian than Gray…
#43 it should not have been an average year according to all the often quoted Hurricane experts. Gray and NTS AMO cycle of +0.2 C will rage for another 20 years! All with 2005 hurricane numbers….. Memory is fleeting….
21 September 2006 at 1:23 AM
I couldn’t help but notice Hurricane Linda (1997, East Pacific) in the lower left of a picture on page 1 in the Introduction . Compare to this picture, or this picture. Linda was the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the North east Pacific, and it occurred during the staggering El Nino of 1997 to 1998.
21 September 2006 at 10:12 AM
Re #14:
I’ve been following the global warming ‘debate’ from the late 80s. It has been clear from the beginning that the denialists have had a three fold strategy: (1) It is not happening. (2) If it is happening, the amount of warming is insignficant or at least manageable. (3) If it is happening, and the effects are likely to be disruptive, it is too late to do anything about it. It is clear from this strategy that the object is not to argue honestly about global warming but to do everything possible to delay doing anything about it.
21 September 2006 at 10:18 AM
Slightly Off-Topic (Things which give me hope.)
“California sues car manufacturers over emissions”
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1658892.ece
21 September 2006 at 10:55 AM
With respect to Bill Gray and the other hurricane experts:
It might be noted that so far this year, the predictions of the hurricane experts, appear to be off with respect to the number of hurricanes. This will undoubtedly be used as evidence that global warming does not affect huricanes, and that chicken littles were reacting hysterically to what happened last year. But in fact, Kerry Emanuel and others, if I understand correctly, have not claimed that there is a relationship between hurricane frequency and global warming, and they certainly wouldn’t cliam that the relationship between intensity of tropical storms and global warming would show up in any one year. So if anyone is mistaken in the science, based on this year, it is Bill Gray and others who claim to be able to predict the likely number of such storms in the current year. Maybe they have to do some more computer modelling :-;
21 September 2006 at 11:04 AM
Re #43:
If I understand correctly, the hurricane predictors have told us we should expect more than the average number of storms this year. In fact, hurricane frequency and intensity should be higher than normal for many years into the future, but, they claim, this has nothing to do with global warming.
21 September 2006 at 11:17 AM
Re: #54
Leonard, there is a diversity of opinion among the skeptics, with varying degrees of validity. The predominate views are that warming is happening but that the models don’t have the predictive skill needed to justify the more extreme predictions, and that solar activity’s contibution is currently at high levels with significant uncertainty regarding its past levels of forcing, so its contribution may be underestimated and furthermore its activity is likely to decrease, as projected both on the basis of paleo record statistics (per Solanki) and on the basis of solar conveyor theory.
Solanki’s recent projections that the climate will be cooler by 0.2 degrees C by 2050, imply that far from being too late, we have nearly another 50 years.
These positions are defensible on any open forum, and I doubt skeptics would run from defending them.
Why not open up this forum, with skeptics also represented among the contributers to assure that all voices are heard, and then direct the WSJ editors to this site? A more permanent, open and well organized discussion can be had here, with more considered choices of words than at a live meeting, where loquaciousness rather than considered opinion will have an advantage.
We should all endeavor to address issues directly and not gloss over or dodge them. I suspect that the end result will not be resolution the issue of global warming, but will clarify the current state of the science. We need skillful models of both the climate and solar activity, and that is probably 5 to 10 years or more a way. I hope we don’t have to wait through two solar cycles to validate the conveyor theory, but we may have to.
[Response: You’ve misunderstood Solanki’s position. If the solar forcing is going to decrease (and I’m not sure that out of the dozen or so predictions out there, there is really a consensus on that), then it would lead to a 0.2 C cooling over what would be expected. He is not arguing for an absolute cooling - just possibly a slightly slower rise. But of course, as soon as any hypothesised cycle switches, it accelarates any GHG warming by about the same rate. There are no peer-reviewed papers (AFAIK) indicating that anything the sun can do will overwhelm the GHG signal in the near future. - gavin]
21 September 2006 at 11:37 AM
re: 54. There are considerable parallels to the way industry responded to acid rain issues in the 1980s, including the supposed devastating effects any acid deposition precursor emission control programs would have on the economy. Of course we all saw what happened…a booming economy in the 1990s.
21 September 2006 at 11:59 AM
Business community is by nature often a conservative one. I’d like to be optimistic in a way that once they realize AGW is bad for business, they will revise their position on the matter. The Economist has already done this, WSJ unfortunately not (yet).
Good news from Britain http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5368194.stm
Many thanks for the great site.
21 September 2006 at 12:28 PM
Re 59: “Business community is by nature often a conservative one. I’d like to be optimistic in a way that once they realize AGW is bad for business, they will revise their position on the matter.”
Along with the news of Branson’s forthcoming investments mentioned in the above BBC link, the New York Times has another interesting piece:
21 September 2006 at 1:42 PM
With respect to Alister and Steve’s points (40, 42), I think what they are getting at was best expressed as weather is an initial value problem, climate is a boundary value problem. I don’t know the original source.
21 September 2006 at 2:40 PM
Re #61:
I thought I understood initial value and boundary value problems, but I don’t see how climate can be interpreted as a boundary value problem. Eli?
Best regards.
Jim Dukelow
[Response:Weather is an initial value problem, given x(t0) what is x(t)? Climate is an boundary value problem what is the distribution of x given the insolation, atmospheric composition, topography etc. The statistical results of an atmospheric model, for instance, are the same regardless of what the initial values of the atmospheric temperature or humidity are, but they will be systematically different if I change GHG levels, or the size of Rocky mountains… - gavin]
21 September 2006 at 2:50 PM
Re #58:
I think that is a variation of strategy 2: yes, but what about …? It is again an argument to delay any action. I am only a poor mathematician who from time to time struggles to understand the science at anything but a superficial level, but it appears to me that Gavin’s response is in line with other things I’ve read.
21 September 2006 at 2:59 PM
“No more business as usual” is the cliched mantra invoked as a blanket solution that’s never spelled out. The abstract of Mr Legget’s paper provides the first dollar amount AGW mitigation would cost that I’ve seen: $67 Trillion. I see mitigation as “Power Down,” since GHG are most directly tied to power generation for static and mobile applications. So if emissions must fall by 60-70% in short order just to stabilize GHG, then it follows that power generation must fall by a similar amount. This begs the questions How, and What will the people thrown out of work do; questions I realize are beyond the scope of this blog but must be faced. In Gore’s recent speech, he makes the answer seem to be no more than a redirection of our economy, while ignoring the need to radically and rapidly reduce the power generation that runs the economy; in other words, business as usual with a different direction. In the paper I’m writing on this subject, I see no way to avoid throwing at least 50 million households in the USA out of the labor market, which means half of US households would be unemployed; and here I’m being optomistic.
So in any debate/discussion with WSJ, lurking in the background is the real inconvenient truth: Mitigation = Power Down = Economic Disruption and social chaos.
21 September 2006 at 4:39 PM
Like Jim I did not know about boundary value problems , nor did I know what Steve Sadlov meant by systems theory but Wikipedia is my friend
It seems that (General) Systems Theory is a generalisation of Dynamical System Theory applied to the social sciences, and what Poincare was saying is that the weather and roulette are similar dynamical systems. One could say that he was contradicting Steve Sadlow, but then Poincare had never heard of General Systems Theory because it was not named until the 1950s and he died in 1912.
It was Poincare’s genius to visualise dynamical systems and their applications, and only my luck to spot that just as the Rockie Mountains (well CO2 really, but Gavin’s parallel is closer) drive the global temperature, the 00 pocket drives the roulette odds. Interestingly, I have just been reading that it was not just Poincare who anticipated Systems Theory. Hegel also saw the history of civilisation as a general system, with power blocks growing and collapsing. This was the inspiration for Karl Marx and the communist revolution. So does that make me Poincare’s Karl Marx
If anyone would like to read what Poincare wrote then there is a translation of his book “Science and Hypothesis” at http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/Poincare/Poincare_1905_01.html This author’s preface is well worth reading, although I had to cut and paste it into a Word document, then tidy up the pagination before printing it off. His message is that the Newtonian machine is not how the world works. In fact it is chaotic. And he was saying that 100 years ago. See what you think!
21 September 2006 at 4:50 PM
Re: Gavin’s response to #58
FYI, it looks like Solanki has corrected/adjusted the results he published in Nature in 2004. I find it significant that his new analysis has adjusted past sunspot numbers up, and he has NOT repeated his claim that recent solar activity is the highest in 8000 years. So I assume his claim would be that the recent warming is just one of the highest.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL025921.shtml
Your interpretation of Solanki’s 0.2 degrees C prediction might well be right. All I have to go on for that is the reporting in New Scientist: “the most recent calculations by Solanki’s team suggest that the sunspot crash could lead to a cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere by 0.2C” It certainly isn’t from a peer review article.
I also have only seen press releases of the predictions of the solar conveyor theory. If the predictions are mentioned in peer review papers, I expect that the actual result of the paper would be reporting of the solar conveyor activity and the predictions would likely be only in the discussion, i.e. not peer reviewed. In the press releases/web reports, the next cycle was expected to be highly active, and the following was to be dramatically less active. I intend to become more familiar with the literature in this area, I’ll let you know if I find anything apropo.
21 September 2006 at 4:55 PM
#59: in the acid rain situation, I think it was fairly obvious what the problem was at the time (dead forests, rotting monuments, dead lakes) and the controls of sulphur emissions were fairly straight forward. Notice too that nothing in industry changed EXCEPT they added scrubbers to powerplants.
Fast forward to this decade: GW is a hypothetical issue to most common people. The expected results are a few degrees C warming, some melting ice, maybe water shortages somewhere we’re never heard of. Routine stuff really, except for scale, regarding which most people have exactly ZERO comprehension. Further, the solutions are not simply to add a scrubber to a few powerplants, no the solutions being advocated require a 180 degree turn away from resource consumption behaviors ingrained over the full 300 years of the industrial revolution.
Thus I am not in the LEAST confident that businesses will either pick up the ball or run with it. EVER. It is exactly this reality that spurs the WSJ and others to tear their hair out in black fury over all this “science” stuff. They simply cannot see a means by which 50% of the economy can continue to exist if we decide to turn back the clock 300 years (as they seem to think is likely to happen). And mind you, they may have something to worry about; our domestic industries have been too slow to adapt and might be at a disadvantage in the not-so-distant future. Further, the American consumer seems to have little or no stomach for these kinds of changes.
I have little hope for a business-led solution, and no hope at all for a consumer-led one, in North America. Given this, and the gravity of the threat before us, it’s hard to maintain one’s spirits.
21 September 2006 at 6:16 PM
RE # 15
George Landis,
Most of what you have to offer is mostly speculation and most often not backed up by facts. Most is not a quantifier. I wonder if most people will agree with anyone who uses most as much as you use most?
Then again, I mostly believe that most of your views about radical left wing enviro-kooks will mostly be seconded by most of your followers most always.
21 September 2006 at 6:39 PM
Maybe it is time for a DNF list, Do Not Fund. I see that in the UK a polite, though formidable letter from the Royal Society was enough to get a big oil company to reply that they would no longer fund a group of pesky deniers, including some of the worst from the States. Why not circulate a list and see how many companies will join up? If nobody pays they will not say, much.
21 September 2006 at 6:40 PM
For cat black, I understand and share your concern, but a recent poll shows
“The survey, sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation, was conducted Aug. 11-16, and included 1,018 respondents. It carries a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.
Nearly three of every four - 74% - are more convinced today that global warming is a reality than they were two years ago, the survey shows. Dramatically, it is a sentiment shared by a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and political independents. While many more Democrats believe in global warming (87%), 56% of Republicans concur. Among independents, 82% think we are experiencing the effects of global warming. These numbers indicate a shift in the momentum of global warming believers.” [I really don’t like the word “believers” because it relates to faith and religion; acceptors I see as an improvement.]
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1161
Unfortuately, there’s only the mention that industry needs to reduce emissions, while this somewhat dated chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png shows “Industrial processes” emitting 16.8%, which while 2nd is 4.5% less than emissions by power stations. Gore is right about one thing: people need to be educated on this topic rapidly as billions of lives are at stake.
21 September 2006 at 7:33 PM
Re: #68, #71
I’d say that Gore deserves much of the credit for changing public perception in the U.S. His movie, and the publicity surrounding it, have dramatically altered public opinion — even among republicans!
To cat black, I say, it’s hard sometimes for me, too. But it’s also important. Take heart in the fact that *we* can make a difference for future generations; our efforts will not be in vain.
And a special thanks to the moderators of RealClimate. Not only have you made the case with compelling reason, you’ve also enabled so many of *us* to make a difference too.
21 September 2006 at 7:51 PM
Re #65: Karl, you’ve misinterpreted my abstract. $67 trillion is to mitigate the 10 or so global risks I assess, not just global warming. And as the expenditure can occur over several decades it works out, as the abstract states, even for all of them at only about 2% of gross world product per year. The details for all this are from the previously published literature. From this data, my paper simply attempts fairly coarse order-of-magnitude quantity surveying of how much of what is needed to be done to achieve full mitigation, how much would that cost and would it be affordable.
Re energy alone, my analysis supports what Mr Gore and many others have observed - that it is indeed just a redirection of our energy sources away from greenhouse gas emitters. In my quantification of this, I came up with the pleasantly surprising finding (which obviously will have to survive further checking), that the cost of the required scale of transition to non-emitting energy sources is actually slightly cheaper than what we would spend on new or replaced conventional plant over the period of the next few decades.
To quote from the paper (Section 3.2.2): “Resource availability is not a constraint: according to The World Energy Assessment, the technically available potential for each carbon and non-carbon) scenario is several orders of magnitude above current global energy use.
Similarly, cost is not a constraint for a range of energy options: on a levelised (full lifecycle
cost) basis, current technology for baseload power for nuclear and some renewables
(geothermal and wind) is comparable to coal (photovoltaics are currently higher in cost)
[51,52]. Finally, capital requirements: as a share of GDP, energy sector investment in the 1990s
was 1-1.5 per cent of global GDP, or $0.29-0.43 tr (average $0.36 tr) [13]. To meet the
GHG reduction target, 60 per cent of the output of this investment would need to be noncarbon
energy. Assuming for convenience that output is proportional to input, 60 per cent
of energy sector investment (or $0.22 tr) would have to be in non-carbon energy.
Concerning costs, the World Energy Assessment [13] has estimated that the above noncarbon scenarios are actually cheaper (by around 50 per cent) than investments expected for a business-as-usual carbon scenario. At, then, conservatively, 30 per cent not 50 per cent lower, capital requirements for noncarbon-scenario packages of (a) nuclear, (b) wind, and (c) geothermal are each costed at
$0.22 tr_0.7 - $0.15 tr per year, or $0.07 tr per year less than the business as usual case.
Disaggregated fuel and other elements of levelised costs [13] are hard to source, and so
they are not specified in this estimate (that is, they are considered to be incurred similarly
for each scenario). Given this treatment favours dearer non-carbon energy generation,
such treatment is conservative. With this background, the total non-carbon energy budget increase/decrease required compared to business as usual is negative $0.07 tr. per year.
21 September 2006 at 9:26 PM
Re: 73> Concerning costs, the World Energy Assessment [13] has estimated that the above noncarbon scenarios are actually cheaper (by around 50 per cent) than investments expected for a business-as-usual carbon scenario.
If that is really true, convincing business to adopt noncarbon generation for baseload power should not be difficult.
The difficult problem may be convincing environmentalists to allow nuclear to be used.
21 September 2006 at 11:38 PM
Re: #67
I have found the full text of the Solanki article which I commented upon based only on the abstract:
cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/2006GL0259211_pub.pdf
To Solanki’s credit, he explicitly comments upon the implications of the new analysis for his previous result. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise, when the full text clarifies questions one had when reading only the abstract. My bad.
21 September 2006 at 11:41 PM
I think RC needs a space where comments can be injected from people living at world wide locations, especially places which are experiencing dramatic climate shifts. Like right now in a big chunk of the High Arctic ,no winter yet!, the shrinkage of multi-year Polar ice, astounding for ice connaisseurs, current El-nino going hotter every day, 1997 redux,, the possible Russian winter big freeze repeat, Mid west USA drought, stange cooling near Antarctica, would be nice to read a near live comment from an antarctican….. I am sure that many are feeling a change in the Pacific various ways. Suprisingly some newspapers do this, cover current weather events while taking comments from many areas in this world, but those articles are 3 gems in a huge sand pit, I rather we communicate these events more often then commenting on a paper which is practically hopeless, this site rocks, but climate music should come from everywhere.
22 September 2006 at 4:56 AM
The problem revolves around time vs the reduction in CO2 emitting technologies. World politics, let alone implementing new technologies is not in our favour to mitigate against probable serious/abrupt climate change. Due to that fact that by around 2050 we would have added another 200 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (4.5 billion * 44 years) making a trillion tonnes in total and it will not be until this time that we have got large scale CO2 neutral technologies into action then I still say that the odds are against us being successful.
The best that we can do in the next 50 years is to make sure that increased energy demand is not CO2 emitting but even this is not guaranteed.
22 September 2006 at 6:18 AM
Re #65 and “So in any debate/discussion with WSJ, lurking in the background is the real inconvenient truth: Mitigation = Power Down = Economic Disruption and social chaos.”
I dispute that we have to generate less power in order to mitigate AGW. We simply have to move to other sources of power.
-BPL
22 September 2006 at 7:00 AM
For Cat Black, you might like to check out the MDI compressed air powered car, now in production in France.
http://www.theaircar.com/
Also a U.S company producing a new solar cell that is roll-printed making it possible, “to put a solar panel on every building”…….I want the car!
22 September 2006 at 7:19 AM
oops….I forgot the link to the solar cell company
http://www.nanosolar.com/
22 September 2006 at 7:28 AM
Re: 73, 74
The total cost can be lower but if, as with nuclear, those costs are primarily upfront, capital investments (or vague future liabilities), then how you raise the money and the assumptions you build into your financing models have a big impact on whether the project is deemed to be viable.
The experience EDF has built up of building out a nuclear fleet for baseload energy and the Finnish model for decommissioning and long-term storage would seem to indicate that nuclear is a soluble problem if you get the appropriate financial and institutional structures in place. Given the lack of appetite in the anglo-saxon economies for financing large-scale engineering ventures with sovereign debt however; and our, frankly, piss-poor record at working out institutional structures that can handle the intergenerational timescales that long-term repositories require - these may not be a messages that our govts are in a good place (ideologically speaking) to hear.
Then there’s the whole green thing of course. Doubtless there are many ‘religious’ greens who will maintain their heartfelt antipathy to the big domes, but I think there are enough ‘evidence based’ greens who will hold their noses and accept a nuclear buildout in preference to coal. Ultimately, my gut feeling is that this will be enough to swing the issue.
Of these two potential roadblocks to acceptance, I’m more worried about the former.
Regards
Luke
22 September 2006 at 9:31 AM
RE Cat Black # 68.
I’m one of those “common” people you say are capable of ZERO comprehension.
I may not have a degree in a scientific field but I have a lot of “common” sense. If you can demonstrate(I’d like to see it) that you know how to slow down hurricanes, stop glaciers from melting, prevent desease, stop frogs from dying, make ice last longer in the Artic, save the rain forests, stop the sea from rising, etc. etc. by just adjusting a few parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere then I’ll accept my station in life as a common person, and you can have the throne.
YOU GUYS ARE NUTS IF YOU REALLY BELIEVE YOU CAN CONTROL THE CLIMATE OF THIS PLANET.100 parts per million less CO2 will do it I suppose, come on now, get real-climate.
22 September 2006 at 10:57 AM
re: 82. Your general personal attack and capital letters/shouting aside as if either do anything to support your comment, we are already affecting the climate of this planet. That is a given. Read the peer-reviewed literature. It is quite comprehensible. The idea that we can only affect climate in a negative way but we can not make positive changes is simply wrong. There are many examples in the past where mankind has caused negative impacts to the environment, only to make changes and corrections for the better.
22 September 2006 at 11:03 AM
Re 82:
So what does your common sense say about doubling or worse the atmospehric concentration of CO_2 and equivalents in other greenhouse gases? Do you claim that you know that climate, both local and global, will be unaffected by such changes? How does common sense convince you that the effect will be minimal?
I suppose that if your doctor tells you your blood pressure has risen to levels that may affect your health, your common sense tells you to ignore that because clearly those guys can’t predict anything as complex as human health.
22 September 2006 at 11:18 AM
Re #74, nuclear electricity generation is not “noncarbon generation”.
While the actual operation of a nuclear power plant does not emit CO2, the entire nuclear power generation cycle, from the mining, refinement and transport of uranium, to the construction of the power plants, to the “disposal” (actual sequestration) of the waste, to the decommissioning of the power plants, there are large amounts of fossil fuels consumed and GHGs emitted at every phase.
Of all the alternatives to burning coal and natural gas to produce electricity, including improved efficiency of use, wind turbines, and photovoltaics, nuclear power is the most expensive way to have the smallest impact on reducing CO2 emissions from electricity generation. And that’s before we even get into a discussion of the other serious problems and dangers of nuclear power.
In my experience, proponents of expanding nuclear electricity generation typically begin with the assumption that it can quickly make a large contribution to reducing GHG emissions, and then move immediately to minimizing the other problems and dangers, and suggesting that the only objections to nuclear power are the irrational concerns of “greens”. But the initial assumption — that nuclear power can significantly and quickly reduce GHG emissions from electricity generation — simply doesn’t hold up.
Whatever valid arguments there may be for a massive worldwide expansion of nuclear electricity generation, mitigating global warming from GHG emissions is not one of them.
22 September 2006 at 11:19 AM
Re 82 84
I must apologize for calling anyone nuts, its just that I can’t conceive of how you can prove that you can control the climate. I’m sure humans and other things could have some impact.
How do you know that any action we take will make the change needed. Doctors can prove that high blood pressure affects my health and can demonstrate that taking medication will reduce it,however they don’t know if I will die of a heart attack tomorrow, and I don’t think we know how the climate will be 50 years from now. I would not take medicine that had not been proven to work.
Good Luck, I know this is really a place for climate scientist to communicate, so I won’t interrupt anymore.
22 September 2006 at 11:29 AM
Milton wrote in #82: “YOU GUYS ARE NUTS IF YOU REALLY BELIEVE YOU CAN CONTROL THE CLIMATE OF THIS PLANET”
I agree that it is “nuts” to believe that humans can “control the climate of this planet.” We have neither the knowledge, nor the understanding, nor the technology to “control” the Earth’s climate.
But that’s not the issue. The issue is that we are altering the Earth’s climate in an uncontrolled way through our burning of fossil fuels and resulting emissions of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases.
Imagining that we can “control” or “manage” the Earth’s climate, or the Earth’s biosphere, is extreme hubris, and symptomatic of the very attitudes that have brought us to the present planetary crisis. What we need to “control” is ourselves, to “live within our means”. If we can accomplish that, the Earth’s biosphere and atmosphere can “control” themselves perfectly well.
22 September 2006 at 2:00 PM
Yes, homocentric hubris indeed to think we can pick the climate we want and engineer the CO2 content to make it happen. Even some otherwise distinguished scientists do actually think this possible, as this quote from Wally Broecker not long ago about his ideas on CO2 removal technology: “The goal is to stop the net buildup of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere by 2075. If we succeed, humankind might even be able to start cutting the amount of greenhouse gases in the air. That would put us in an interesting position, according to Broecker: “We as a planet would have to decide what CO2 level gives us the best - quote, unquote - climate.”
22 September 2006 at 2:56 PM
Re #88:
Why do you consider it hubris to hope/expect that someday we’ll be able to control the Earth’s climate to keep it in an optimum state? As SecularAnimist pointed out in #87, we are already altering the Earth’s climate. And have been for some time. The problems are arising because we’re doing it not by design but through ignorance and poor planning, and with little consideration of the consequences.
If we succeed in arresting the discharge of greenhouse gases we will have a tremendous pool of technology and expertise to draw upon for the task of reducing greenhouse gases to a better level. Do you really think that on the future day that CO2 levels are stabilized that people everywhere will declare “Mission Accomplished” and stop working to improve and restore the environment?
There is no hubris involved in dedicating ones time and energy to making things better for everyone.
22 September 2006 at 3:19 PM
Mr. Shaw, in my opinion it is hubris to think we puny humans could actually control climate, because I don’t think it is even remotely possible. It is, however, human stupidity to think we could actually agree on what that “optimum state” (as you put it), is. What global average temperature is optimum to you? That is more than likely not optimum to me, we cannot as a species even decide what religion is best, or political system, much less what climate and temperature suits everyone as optimum. But I suppose you could let the UN debate it and come to a consensus, how would you like that, considering how good they are at doing things?
[Response: Before this gets further into the realm of science fiction, it’s probably worth stating that no one seriously considers climate control a relevant issue on the time scales we generally think about (i.e. the next few decades to a century). Andrew Dessler has a good point to make on the existence of an ‘optimum’ climate on his blog (and for those who don’t click through, the point that he makes is that for practical purposes the optimum is the one we have now). -gavin]
22 September 2006 at 3:35 PM
the point that he makes is that for practical purposes the optimum is the one we have now
Stability is key. Agriculture has a horizon of two seasons: this growing season and the previous one. The farmer plants this year with the expectation that this year will be like the last one. If there’s more energy in the atmosphere, there will be more variability in weather. Too much variability and his crop fails. Too many failures and there’s famine.
22 September 2006 at 5:12 PM
Re #85:
SecularAnimist needs to get real. The carbon-releasing aspects of a nuclear fuel cycle are 2nd or 3rd order effects and shared, to a greater or lesser degree, by the alternatives than he likes.
Given that the US generates 65-70% of its electricity by burning fossil fuel, no feasible ramp-up in nuclear electricity is going to “significantly and quickly reduce GHG emissions from electricity generation”, but each base-load nuclear plant that replaces one or more fossil fuel plants will produce a measurable and non-trivial reduction in CO2 emissions. France is the nuclear poster child at the moment, producing on the order of 70-75% of its electricity from nuclear plants, with a “significant” reduction in CO2 emissions.
Best regards.
Jim Dukelow
22 September 2006 at 5:22 PM
Re Gavin’s response in #63:
I am unpersuaded. Most of the boundary conditions Gavin cites also apply to weather forecasting. It appears to me that climate modeling (with GCMs) has the kind of constraints on the equations and the parameters that Gavin describes, but its real difference from weather forecasting is that the time horizon is pushed way past the threshold where chaos makes a weather forecast silly, out to some distant time t_end AND THEN we apply a variety of statistical functionals to the output to get a statistical description of the average behavior of a weather trajectory over that long time interval. A true boundary problem would define the initial conditions at time t_0 and the final conditions at time t_end and ask for the solution of the equations that satisfied the boundary conditions.
Best regards.
Jim Dukelow
[Response: You don’t get it. The boundary value problem is when the initial values do not matter - i.e. the statistics don’t depend on conditions at t_0 (or t_end for that matter). - gavin]
22 September 2006 at 6:37 PM
Re #90 & 91 I haven’t read Andrew Dessler but I agree with the point that he makes that for practical purposes the optimum is the one we have now.
But it not the climate we have now that is optimised. It is us who are optimised. We have adapted to maximise the return from the planet and expanded our population to take advantage of all its niches. If we change the climate, then many of these niches will disappear and the inhabitants will suffer. New niches will not relieve the suffering of the losers, nor provide any more happines for their new occupants.
22 September 2006 at 6:52 PM
Re #93
Jim, what we are saying is that the weather like one throw at roulette. You might win $1, $5, $110 or lose your stake. Similarly the weather tomorrow may be 1C, 5C, or 110F. (Just as there is a maximum stake there is a maximum temperature.)
However, if you play on the tables for several hours, then you know on average you will lose money and you can calulate how much. It is the same with the climate. If you increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere over ten years then you know how much on average the temperature will rise.
You can’t predict how much you will on one the throw of a dice after several hours play, and you can’t tell what the temperature will be on a day in ten years time. But you can say what the climate will be in ten years time.
Gavin, can you confirm that you agree with this/Poincare’s analogy.
22 September 2006 at 6:54 PM
Re #94:
It’s not just us … pretty much all life is optimized for the current climate. One can expect a pretty hefty reduction in the productivity of most biomes if the climate changes substantially.
That aside, the current climate is pretty good. Sea level is reasonably low thanks to Antarctica. Grasslands and temperate forests (the two biomes best suited for humans) cover a pretty hefty portion of the globe. Warm the globe up a little and deserts grow while vast amounts of coastal plains drown. Cool it down a little and much of the planet becomes covered by ice sheets and taiga.
22 September 2006 at 7:00 PM
Jim Dukelow wrote in #92: “SecularAnimist needs to get real.”
Dutch chemist Jan-Willem Storm van Leeuwen and American physicist Philip Smith have published “a physical analysis of the nuclear system: the full technical and industrial complex, needed to generate electricity from uranium” which examined “the potential contribution of nuclear power to the world energy supply in the future and to the mitigation of the anthropogenic climate change in the future.”
They concluded:
And:
The report is available online, with a summary in HTML and the full text in PDF format:
http://www.stormsmith.nl
22 September 2006 at 7:55 PM
Re: #11, #7 The whole State Climatologist issue. I think the letter of support is more a defense of the State Climate Office program as a whole. Having worked several years in a SCO/Regional Climate Center…the folks in those offices have a good grasp of climate change and the issues. Because the programs are “operational” in their nature…the mindset tends to be a bit more towards that of operational forecasters (see Dr Curry’s remarks in previous post and the current issue of BAMS). It’s not a denial mentality…it’s a different culture. As far as the AASC…read the (still current) climate change policy:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/aasc/aascclimatepolicy.pdf
The SCO/RCC program provides important data, research, and outreach functions to the US. I personally was a bit miffed when I read some of the language in the Post. The SCO/RCC programs are a great deal more than “weather librarians”.
As far as Dr Michaels…he is still the NCDC recognized SC of Virginia.
Cheers!
22 September 2006 at 9:06 PM
In a Google group on science environment I responded as to what I think constitutes a proper time frame for one to move from weather to climate. I gave it some more thought and edited my reply as follows:
Climate exists for periods of little or no change in climate states. Climate states include ice, vegetation, atmospheric and oceanic conditions. As a result of anthropogenic global warming, the world’s climate states have been changing rapidly during the last few decades. Now we have global weather and climate change. We no longer have current global climate, only climate state.
Original comment in reply 20 of: What does a 100-Year anything mean?
at:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.environment?start=90&sa=N
22 September 2006 at 9:27 PM
Re #97:
From what I got out of that report, current uranium reserves, at least of marginal ores (0.02 to 0.1% concentration) look fairly substantial. The best ores (>10% and decomissioned nuclear weapons) are indeed very close to depleted, but there’s plenty of room between that and ores which cannot be profitable extracted on a net energy basis. While it does mean that we could fuel our reactors for hundreds of years before the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) strictly fell below one, the pollution, including CO2, would be pretty lousy and the EROEI would still be lousy enough to make nuclear power an expensive and inefficient proposition.
Still, if breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing can ever be made practical, even lousy ores (down to perhaps 0.005% concentration - giving reserves far in excess of other fossil fuels) could be used with an EROEI over 1. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen though.
As uranium prices have risen rapidly in the last several years (from under $20/kg to about $110/kg today), we’ll probably get much better evidence of how extensive profitable (generally high EROEI) uranium reserves are in a few years.
22 September 2006 at 9:32 PM
re 98. … the folks in those offices have a good grasp of climate change and the issues. …
Royce,
The State Climatology’s Statement on Climate Change says:
… While the State Climatology Office is not actively involved in scholarly work investigating the issue of climate change, our Office is often called upon to offer scientific opinions on the topic. The subject matter is of professional interest to us, but we make no claim of expertise in this highly complicated and politicized field of study. …
http://climate.umn.edu/doc/climate_change.htm
I think their use of the words ‘highly complicated and politicized field of study’ for global warming science downplays the knowledge and seriousness of the subject and encourages a mentality for people to do nothing significant in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The words ‘highly complicated and politicized field of study’ for global warming science have also been used by supervisors of operational National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs), the NWS river forecast centers, NWS regional offices and NWS headquarters.
23 September 2006 at 8:04 AM
Here’s a couple of general comments on possible solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7904236
I wonder how many people are killed or injured changing lightbulbs every year? If LED lighting becomes universal, since the bulbs last over 10x longer, that should reduce death/injury from changing them by over 10x. Also reduces maintenance costs of buildings. I wonder if the studies that look into the economics of climate change solutions factor in these sorts of benefits?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5369284.stm
Personally, I think that by far the most energy efficient means of transport (and hence, lowest CO2 emissions) would be for cars to be only powered by electric motors (no fuel burning engine at all). This simple Flash slide-show makes a pretty good summary:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/converted.swf
(click on each slide to advance it)
Now, Tesla Motors are planning to start shipping their EV sports car in 9-ish months, so aren’t a neutral party - but they do give references for their figures. Still, with electic motors and batteries both being able to achieve over 90% efficiency, it’s not like there’s any technology today that can beat it by a non-trivial amount. (Shame super-conducting motors would be impractical for cars - though trains, boats and maybe even trucks could be possible). Tesla’s first car costs $100k or so but they’re planning to use the profits from it to develop cheaper more general purpose electric cars:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/?p=8
23 September 2006 at 9:45 AM
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