Freeman Dyson’s selective vision
In the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson reviews two recent ones about global warming, but his review is mostly shaped by his own rather selective vision.
1. Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.
2. Economic estimates of the costs of cutting CO2 emissions are huge. In an absolute sense, this is true, it would be a lot of dollars, but it comes down to a few percent of GDP, which, in an economic system that grows by a few percent per year, just puts off the attainment of a given amount of wealth by a few years. And anyway, business-as-usual will always argue that the alternative would be catastrophic to our economic well being. Remember seat belts? Why is it that Dyson’s remarkably creative powers of vision (carbon-eating trees for example) fail to come up with alternatives to the crude and ugly process of burning coal to generate electricity?
3. The costs of climate change are in the distant future, and therefore should be discounted, in contrast to the hysterical Stern Report. I personally can get my head around the concept of discounting if the time span is short enough that it’s the same person on either end of the transaction, but when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now. Remember that the lifetime of the elevated CO2 concentration in the air is different from the lifetime of CO2 to exchange with the biosphere. Release a slug of CO2 and you will increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. The fundamental tenet of civil society is to protect people from harm inflicted by others. Are we a civilized species, or are we not? The question is analogous to using economics to decide whether to abolish slavery. I’m sure it was very costly for the Antebellum Southern U.S. to forego slave labor, but it simply wasn’t an economic question.
4. Majority scientists are contemptuous of those in the minority who don’t believe in the dangers of climate change. I often find myself contemptuous of efforts to misrepresent science to a lay audience. The target audience of denialism is the lay audience, not scientists. It’s made up to look like science, but it’s PR. We have documented Lindzen’s tortured and twisted representation of the science to non-scientists here and here. If Lindzen had a credible argument to support his gut feeling (and apparently Dyson’s), I can promise that I for one would take it seriously. I’ve got kids at home whose future I worry about. If Lindzen were right, no one would be happier about that than me. But I do get contemptuous of BS.
24 May 2008 at 6:01 PM
Dyson is a good physicist, but far too often his predictions and analyses of thing’s strictly beyond the realm of physics seem far too speculative and don’t seem to address current problems. Dyson Spheres, Dyson Trees, and genetically engineered plants for Carbon Sequestering all make for good thought experiments and “what-if” scenarios, but none of this stuff addresses current problems in any meaningful way.
Of course, Dyson also seems to think the costs of global warming are only in the distant future, so I suppose this deficiency in his “dyson vison” doesn’t bother him that much.
24 May 2008 at 6:06 PM
I am beginning to have severe doubts on that score.
Good point with #4. I’m not contemptuous of deniers per se, just of the misleading ‘facts’ they use. Anyway, fight fire with fire. If they’re going to go out of their way to insult their ‘opposition’…
24 May 2008 at 6:12 PM
You do a great service by this discussion. I hope the NY Review of Books can reprint or note the link for their readers.
It is crucial that media editors get up to speed on these issues.
Many thanks for responding.
24 May 2008 at 6:27 PM
It’s nice to recognize the carbon storage value of trees and forests, but genetic engineering may have unacceptable unintended consequences or won’t obtain the desired results. In response to warming, below-ground biological activity will increase and with it the rate of turn-over of old soil carbon pools, so the “extra” carbon that may be pumped into the soil by genetically altered trees may not stay for long. See María Jesús Iglesias Briones, Nicholas J. Ostle and Mark H. Garnett. Invertebrates increase the sensitivity of non-labile soil carbon to climate change. Soil Biology and Biochemistry. Volume 39, Issue 3, March 2007, Pages 816-818.
In addition to modifying trees to pump more carbon into the soil, some have suggested that we should take genetic engineering in another direction as well - to weaken the cell walls of plants so that the cellulose can be more easily converted to biofuels. I hope we are thinking through all the unintended consequences, such as structurally weakened trees that are less able to grow to great size and consequently less able to store carbon.
For more information on the carbon storage value of forests (*not* genetically altered), see the recent report of Oregon Wild., here: http://tinyurl.com/2n96m5
24 May 2008 at 6:46 PM
Thank you for the excellent words. Freeman Dyson is way too smart to ignore, but everybody makes mistakes.
24 May 2008 at 7:55 PM
My heartfelt thank to David for his comments on Freeman Dyson, not only for rebutting Dyson’s utopian ideas but for showing us non=-scientists that science is not all bad, that there are honest scientists, and that debate and dissent constitute progress, not obstruction or fundamental disagreement . Too many otherwise progressive people make too little effort to listen to these debates. If they did, they would stop being suspicious of science and realize that science is not our enemy but one of our most powerful tools to counteract ideology, propaganda and the conspiracy theories that inhabit our society and the internet in particular.
24 May 2008 at 8:02 PM
Dyson accepts the consenus and refers to his predictions as “a story, not science”, from what I have seen he likes to play the devils advocate. No different in motive and moral, or less confusing in content, than some of the ‘rantings’ of Lovelock. To write either off as malevolent/uniformed/stupid/senile would be foolish. BTW: I don’t accuse realclimate of having done that, but my own prediction is that others will.
24 May 2008 at 8:31 PM
Very useful post.
Dyson jumped the shark on global warming a while back. See
http://climateprogress.org/2007/08/15/freeman-dyson-climate-crackpot/
Then again, although a brilliant ‘theoretical’ scientist, he’s never been all that practical. He was, after all, one of the “geniuses” pushing Project Orion — the incredibly absurd idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs (you can Google it).
Finally, the discounting issue, while important, is not as important to cost-benefit analyses as the serious prospect of catastrophic outcomes, as Harvard’s Weitzman has shown:
http://climateprogress.org/2007/09/11/weitzman-economics-climate-change-catastrophe/
That said, the mainstream economic policy think tank — Resources for the Future (RFF) — wrote a major report, “An Even Sterner Review,” that concluded, “we find no strong objections to the discounting assumptions adopted in the Stern Review”! And RFF is about as middle of the road as you get.
See also http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/dont-discount-the-stern-review/
24 May 2008 at 8:44 PM
David
“The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined.”
I am certainly not an advocate of “business-as-usual”. And I am a strong advocate of energy sources that do not use carbon. But I am wondering if there is enough recoverable carbon to release quite as much carbon to the air you suggest here. I really don’t know one way or the other.
Al Crawford
[Response: There is about 5000 Gton C of coal, compared with about 500 (trees) + 1500 (soils) on land. Of oil and gas there are only a few hundred Gton each. Coal is the real issue. David]
24 May 2008 at 8:47 PM
I think the 4% discount rate is fruitloooooopy.
I don’t see how he can claim 4% is conservative. Holocene economists appear woefully unprepared for the Anthrocene. How could they be? It’s a wheat field today. It was a wheat field 100 years ago. In many cases it was a wheat field a century ago, or much longer.
I wonder what discount rate an Australian agricultural economist would recommend?
- The Economist
Under the “warming is going to be peachy keen” notions, some newly warmed place else is going to grow replacement wheat, right? Did the Canadians forget to plant their new fields?
24 May 2008 at 8:59 PM
I think the “discounting” argument is particularly fallacious in this case. What if we applied the argument to cancer or to an epidemic? Clearly, the worst costs are well down the road, so if we do nothing now, we will be in a better position to pay those costs later. Discounting does not do a good job when a system has positive feedbacks that ensure greater damage if nothing is done.
Unfortunately, I think that there are a lot of scientists (non-climate scientists) who do not like the idea that we will have to divert so many of our resources in the near future to mitigating climate change instead of making progress in other (their) areas of science. However, it won’t do us much good to know the mass of the Higgs Boson if our civilization cannot feed itself.
24 May 2008 at 9:02 PM
I’m still waiting for my jetpack, flying car and robot servant, I’m not holding my breath until genetics magically solves the carbon problem.
24 May 2008 at 9:10 PM
Dyson has a long standing preoccupation with bioengineering plants to do remarkable things, like providing space habitats. It is unfortunate that he used this public forum to inappropriately ride his hobby horse. As for his comments on Lindzen and Rahmsdorf, I wonder how he would feel about individuals claiming that quantum electrodynamics, a remarkably successful theory to which he made major contributions, is wrong.
24 May 2008 at 9:29 PM
Dyson suffers from the same mental blinders as a lot of dreamers, who can only dream of a better world. I suppose this is entangled with the Judeo-Christian view that “things will get better just you wait” thing, played out in the world of physics and science for the pleasure of a secular audience. Of course, 50 years of seemingly endless progress would seem at first to prove them right, it really is upwards all the time. Until one realizes that the progress was based on the unleashing of stored energy to drive the pistons of industrial might, and almost nothing more.
Successful dreamers, the ones who make a living at selling dreams, usually have a happy vision to share. They will write you a book about that. People like to buy their books and read them to feel better about the vague terror that is creeping into their days and nights. Nobody wants a sad book about nightmares, catastropie and individual responsibilty. Nobody wants to think about rolling back 600 years of “progress” to some other world that feels uncomfortably like the Middle Ages. No not that, surely technology will pull us out of this. Think Happy Thoughts. Buy something shiny.
We are asleep, walking. Almost 7 billion, oblivious. Genetically engineer us a clue if you can.
cb
24 May 2008 at 9:29 PM
Re: the notion that costs of cutting CO2 emissions are a few % of GDP. Global warming is only a symptom of our collective disease of striving for ever greater growth. Other symptoms include massive extinction of species, resource exhaustion (e.g., peak oil), reducing the long term carrying capacity of the planet, etc. The list is long. If global warming doesn’t get us, then one of the other upcoming problems will.
The notion that our economy will grow ad infinitum is absurd. We might be able to sustain economic growth for another 20-30 years at best, and then things get ugly. We should be thinking about how to preserve the habitability of the planet for future generations. Right now, your kids’ future (and mine, too, regretably) is looking very bleak.
The point is, forget about GDP. Don’t even engage in the argument, because it trivializes the challenge we face. This is about saving Mother Earth, and arguing over dollars and cents obscures the real issue.
24 May 2008 at 10:00 PM
Dyson is talking through his “sphere” (in a manner of speaking).
Biochar seems to be an important process in permanently removing carbon in the atmosphere while increasing crop/plant growth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
24 May 2008 at 10:11 PM
On point 3. Your final argument about economics and slavery is weak. The derogatory term “the dismal science” for economics comes from Thomas Carlyle who attacked economists such as John Stuart Mill for supporting the emancipation of slaves and argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies. And the “idea, that people are just people, can be traced from Mill back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.”
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismal_Science and http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal.html
24 May 2008 at 10:22 PM
Brett: Speaking as a card-carrying economist (no throwing of rotten tomatoes, please), I have to say that we have little choice but to express such things in dollars (meaning currency, not necessarily US$). We have to make economic decisions, by which I mean the allocation of scarce resources, and the only way to do that is by trying our best to measure the costs and benefits (including avoided catastrophes) in some common unit. Since many of the things we’ll do, like impose a price on carbon or move people away from flooding coastal areas or find ways to replace farm land poisoned by encroaching salt water, will be measured in dollars already, that’s probably the right choice.
Yes, it’s very distasteful, and yes, it seemingly trivializes almost every aspect of the GW challenge. But because we have so many options to choose from, we need a way to rank and combine them to make the most of our scarce resources to achieve the desired goal.
24 May 2008 at 11:00 PM
Hmmm…
How is it that economic analyses that end up deciding that we need do nothing now because it will be cheaper using some theoretical new technology, never come up with how much we need to be taxing ourselves now to invest to pay for what our grandchildren are going to have to do? When I start seeing the delayers proposing tax rates, I’ll start to take them seriously.
Oh, and how do we compensate the folks that are being harmed by AGW now?
Tim
24 May 2008 at 11:13 PM
David, thanks for calling the thing by its right name. It’s time the press stepped up to the plate and acknowledged that much of the public controversy is traceable to deliberate nonscientific efforts to mislead.
Also I agree that discounting is the wrong way to think on very long time scales. On the other hand I also agree with Lou Grinzo (#18) that our circumstances are sufficiently complex that we need some sort of quantitative way of expressing our choices. Whatever model we construct will be far less reliable than any climate model, but quanlitative understanding may emerge from the right quantitative models. However, I very much doubt that the correct measure of long-term well-being is commensurable with currency at all.
Will my descendants in a hundred years be better off with $100 in Scenario A or with $90 in scenario B? Clearly that depends on the rate of exchange between scenario A and scenario B. But, as far as I know Chase bank does not buy hypothetical dollars from, say, the universe where Karl Rove was a successful used car dealer in Amarillo and left the rest of us alone. When you consider the matter, you will see that there really is no medium of exchange across hypotheticals. It is very easy for me to imagine cases where the $90 in scenario B is in fact not only preferable but vastly preferable to the $100 in scenario A.
I conclude that money is intrinsically a short term measure. In a sense, that is what the discount rate is trying to tell us. It’s not that the future is worthless; it’s that its worth isn’t meaningfully measured in 2008 dollars at all. Insofar as economics reduces all decisions to a medium of exchange at a particular, such a theory cannot be useful in long range planning. This doesn’t release us from our moral obligation to our distant descendants or the world they will inherit.
25 May 2008 at 12:16 AM
I tend to read a lot of press releases about global warming in my spare time. The most recent ice core samples were extended from 600,000 years ago to 800,000 years ago. The story hit the news about two weeks ago. The core samples showed that co2 is now higher than at any time within the past 800,000 years.We are at 385 ppm , with no end in sight to a rapidly increasing ppm figure. In fact, I’ve read that 450 to 550 ppm is forseeable. My research indicates that the Siberian peat moss, Arctic tundra, and methal hydrates(frozen methane at the bottom of the ocean) all have an excellent chance of melting and releasing their stored co2.Recent methane concentration figures also hit the news last week, and methane has increased after a long time being steady.The forests of north america are drying out and are very susceptible to massive insect infestations and wildfires, and the massive die offs-25% of total forests, have begun.And, the most recent stories on the Amazon forecast that with the change in rainfall patterns one third of the Amazon will dry and turn to grassland, thereby creating a domino cascade effect for the rest of the Amazon.With co2 levels risng faster now that the oceans have reached carrying capacity, the oceans having become also more acidic, and the looming threat of a North Atlanic current shutdown(note the recent terrible news on salinity upwelling levels off Greenland,) and the change in cold water upwellings, leading to far less biomass for the fish to feed upon, all lead to the conclusion we may not have to worry about NASA completing its inventory of near earth objects greater than 140 meters across by 2026(Recent Benjamin Dean astronomy lecture here in San Francisco). Note: Tungusta blast in Siberia 100 years was an object only 30 meters across. I’ve said it before on this most excellent website, RealClimate, and I’ll say it again:I’m not a scientist, but I know what I read. 385 ppm, and climbing rapidly. End of story.Period.Falling 80% below 1990 levels by 2050?Lieberman- Warner bill needs to be “fall 80% below 1990 levels right now” for there to be any chance at all. I’ve got the guts to say it, so I’ll say it again. Humans, fall right now 80% below 1990 levels of worldwide manmade co2 output, or you’ll go the way of the dodo, dodo.Then, according to this cool new book I’m reading called “The World without us”, by Alan Weisman,the Earth will gradually be recovered with forests and grassland, and new species will arise.Where are those crystal skulls when you need em, Freeman?
Mark J. Fiore, Harvard 1982, Boston College Law School, 1987,often hikes in Western Marin County, CA, where there are still some redwoods not yet shriveled.
markfiore50@hotmail.com
25 May 2008 at 12:30 AM
Kudos to 18. Lou Grinzo. Investments needed to combat AGW need to
pass economic muster, by economists, not climatologists.
No matter how morally righteous environmentalists may feel, the
best allocation of resources belong to economists and politicians
that represent the public, balancing current and future human needs.
How much should we sacrifice for future generations?
How about as much as past generations gave us?
Re. 15-Brett states that the idea of infinite economic growth is
absurd. Nonsense! Economic growth is a function of the human mind
and its capacity for knowledge. It’s as large as the universe!
Peak oil in a few years will be as important as peak whale oil 120 years ago. Environmentalists frequently sound like Malthusians
full of todays limitations as absolutes.
Society will always change, the climate will always change, and the
human mind will find a way to adapt and prosper.
25 May 2008 at 12:30 AM
[#18] “Yes it’s distasteful” No it’s not distasteful, it’s folly. “Distasteful” is when you need to take some medicine or other for your future good, though it is unpleasant at the time, and you do it anyway because you know you will feel better. “Folly” is taking the wrong medicine or none at all because you don’t understand the threat of your illness, and then you die.
Climate change has the potential to change ours into a different planet, different in significant ways from the planet on which we evolved and our civilizations put root. Using modern concepts of economics IN ANY FORM to weigh a problem of such vast and terrible scope is folly. Just because the last 200 years was all about economics does not alter the looming reality that economics as we have recently known it might be at an abrupt, perhaps permanent, end.
We need a new language for this. I am told that the Inuit have 20 different words for “snow”. Modern thinkers seem to have a very tiny vocabulary for discussing “progress”, stuck in a linear space of percentage increases and per capita consumption. This even at the moment that we desperately need to define the idea of progress in a much more rich language to include resource progress, individual progress, spiritual progress, sustainable progress, retro-progress, intelligent progress, deranged progress, progress that-hurts-us-now-but-preserves-future-generations, progress-that-builds-on-past-lessons, JIT-progress, and what have you.
Economics simply cannot be about growth of the GDP when the carbon output of the GDP is poised to erase our very civilization. There is no product, gross or domestic or otherwise, once Earth is a different planet and humanity is one moving, wretched mass of refugees.
cb
25 May 2008 at 12:55 AM
I’ve read Stern [which uses numbers from IPCC, which came from World Bank, etc], the MIT study and its Appendix C, and the NRDC report, among others.
People seem to:
A) Specify a scenario, and project GDP forward by applying a CAGR, usually around 2% [but varies]. At 2.2% (as in NRDC], US GDP would be ~7X larger in 2100 than now.
B) Then costs of mitigation or damage are computed in some bottom-up manner.
C) Then C = B/A by year gives the fraction of GDP.
CONCERNS:
The standard economic projections appear to totally ignore Peak Oil+Gas. Contrary to them, a few biophysical economists seem to think that economic growth is actually influenced by work = efficiency * energy, and that in fact, that’s a pretty good model for the 60% of GDP growth usually attributed to “Solow Residual” or “Total Factor Productivity”. If that makes any sense, the downslide of Peak Oil+Gas over the next few decades might just impact that nice growth CAGR. For example, the last page of Ayres shows 3 curves depending on efficiency. [Effective message to US: either get more energy-efficient (and build renewables) *really* fast or see GDP stop growing and even shrink. Other message: stretch oil&gas as far as we can.]
We all know that predicting trends based on past trends can get clobbered by surprise inflections in underlying factors if they are not properly accounted for. For instance, if one ignores laws of physics, one can predict Moore’s law goes on forever … but nobody in the semiconductor business does that.
We’ll probably find out by 2020 whether the happy CAGRs are real, or whether the biophysical economists have a real issue.
The other concern, as with the NRDC, is that the damage costs might be substantially underestimated. Local government people around the San Francisco Bay Area already have concerns with preparation for sea level rise. We have a massive amount of infrastructure built at or near sea level, and built with $20/bbl oil, i.e., cheap energy.
In 2100, if someone is building dikes or steel+concrete sea walls, they will have little or no petroleum. They will have electricity and biofuels, but phyiscal work gets really expensive, especially when you don’t know how high the water is going to get before it stops - it’s *not* quite like the Netherl;ands dike-building efforts.
So, it may well be that later damage costs are underestimated as well, because the *replacement* costs of coastal facilities will be very high, as will costs of water infrastructure, and pumps, and such.
So, especially for the economists out there:
a) Can you help me understand why the standard GDP models are immune to peak Oil+Gas?
b) Why won’t post-petroleum damage costs be much higher?
25 May 2008 at 1:12 AM
Dyson is a visionary, I like his ideas.
A tree that is a biodiesel pump in your back yard ? that I want !
Modify the Maple Syrup trees ?
Carbon credits pumping cash back ?
Biodiesel trees will need a lot of CO2
Greenhouses run over 1,000 ppm CO2.
The last thing you want is to make CO2 biologically unavailable.
25 May 2008 at 4:00 AM
Cat Black above, said it so well, I just want to repeat his/her words:
“Dyson suffers from the same mental blinders as a lot of dreamers, who can only dream of a better world. I suppose this is entangled with the Judeo-Christian view that “things will get better just you wait” thing, played out in the world of physics and science for the pleasure of a secular audience. Of course, 50 years of seemingly endless progress would seem at first to prove them right, it really is upwards all the time. Until one realizes that the progress was based on the unleashing of stored energy to drive the pistons of industrial might, and almost nothing more.
Successful dreamers, the ones who make a living at selling dreams, usually have a happy vision to share. They will write you a book about that. People like to buy their books and read them to feel better about the vague terror that is creeping into their days and nights. Nobody wants a sad book about nightmares, catastropie and individual responsibilty. Nobody wants to think about rolling back 600 years of “progress” to some other world that feels uncomfortably like the Middle Ages. No not that, surely technology will pull us out of this. Think Happy Thoughts. Buy something shiny.
We are asleep, walking. Almost 7 billion, oblivious. Genetically engineer us a clue if you can.”
Time will tell. Not the magazine Time, but time itself. Writ large.
25 May 2008 at 4:41 AM
[Quote]
“that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us.”
[/Quote]
Have I have missed something? Because, presumably this means that assuming the “business-as-usual” scenario, that the carbon off-setting industry, is more about off-ripping and making promises that are impossible to keep. All in-order to make money while deceiving the public that offsetting offers a realistic prospect of successfully combating climate change.
Of course this ignores the following probable but naive mindset: “So I can now increase the size of my carbon footprint, because It’s all offset!” - which would be even worse than the “business-as-usual” scenario.
25 May 2008 at 7:03 AM
One (of many) questions that must be answered is, “Is it possible to sustain the increasing wealth of a growing world population and not damage the natural environment past the threshold where it can support life?
Our economic system is based on unending growth, and as world population increases the only way that can be done is by increasing the rate at which we use natural resources.
The “reduce, reuse, recycle” approach can help, so can more efficient manufacturing and advancements in material sciences (allowing fewer resources to be used in manufacture and production of products of the same or better quality).
But can anyone doubt that if it is business as usual for the forseeable future that we are headed for a Malthusian limit?
That limit, if reached, will of course hit some sooner than others. The others are the “haves” while that “have nots” will be the first reduced to a subsistence existence. Maybe we are seeing the approach of that limit now?
Is a “steady state” world economy possible? I do not know. But you would think that obviously intelligent, informed(?) and educated people like Dyson would acknowledge there is a problem that can be fixed.
If my son and daughter-in-law choose to have children they deserve a world that is as good as we can hand to them for their years of stewardship.
25 May 2008 at 7:25 AM
Conrad Lautenbacher, head of NOAA, continues to misrepresent the science of global warming to lay audiences, in what he said recently, below:
Whether there is warming or not, no one doesn’t want solid, scientific information,
NOAA chief urges creation of a new National Climate Service to coordinate information
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID , Associated Press, May 13, 2008
http://www.startribune.com/nation/18899439.html
25 May 2008 at 7:56 AM
I am a great fan of Freeman Dyson, but in this instance I believe your comments are largely correct. He has some imaginative ideas, but they are for the future and they may be needed to get to James Hansen’s goal of 350ppm of CO2. But as Joseph Romm points out in “Hell and High Water” waiting for tomorrow’s technology to solve today’s problems is an invitation to mass extinction. We will have to go to a WWII footing if we are to have any chance of saving the planet. There is no way we can convince the rest of the world that we believe this to be a serious problem without substative action on our part. “It is hard to preach abstinance while sitting on a bar stool.”
25 May 2008 at 8:09 AM
Why should we turn to economists for this? They are the ones who have been discounting environmental damage for well over a century. The paradigm of eternal growth is outright insane, and the dismissal of society-wide negative impacts has been disastrous time and time again. Any attempt to assess the “economics” of climate change should be scientific. It should not be the god-awful pseudoscience that has helped bring us to the climate problems we have today.
25 May 2008 at 9:43 AM
On a related note, there is an article on the Economics and Ethics of Climate Change in the June 2008 Scientific American, authored by John Broome. He discusses the economic forecasting of the impact of global warming by N. Stern and by W. Nordhaus. The author points out that economists cannot avoid making ethical choices in formulating their advice. It’s a good article, but I was hoping for a summary of the physical science, something SciAm would do well. As for Dyson, he’s a big hero of mine. Nice to see he’s doing well at 85. And I love the idea of those carbon-eating trees. It’s obvious that the cheapest solution would be a major breakthrough in technology.
25 May 2008 at 9:48 AM
Re # 22 Fred Jorgenson:
” the best allocation of resources belong to economists and politicians that represent the public, balancing current and future human needs.”
I suppose it depends on which humans you are referring to. Seems to me the political fortunes of the decision-makers tend to play a major role in this.
25 May 2008 at 10:51 AM
Let us not forget that very soon we will be developing some sort of quantum nano technology which will make all our dreams come true instantly at no cost whatsoever so therefore we can do anything we want right now.
Meanwhile, I am a Sober Minded Realist and all you Gloomy Enviro-Whackoes need to chill out.
25 May 2008 at 10:58 AM
Before the experimental proof of Dyson’s favoured Quantum Electrodynamics, what would have been the result of a cost-benefit analysis using a 4% discount rate? My guess is that noone would have bothered continuing work on verifying QED. The reason is simple: the consequences of successful experiments, in terms of economic benefit, would have been unimaginable to economists of the day. The costs, however, would have been easier to determine. A similar situation exists with QCD, extra-solar planet discovery, Mars missions, GM, NASA, CERN, CSIRO, and so on.
While a discounting argument is helpful on shortish time scales during which technological change is guesstimatible, it is unfortunately questionable (ie “the science is not settled” on discounting methodology) over long run time scales involving inter-generational populations - IMHO.
25 May 2008 at 11:07 AM
In response to that article’s #4 point.
Whenever someone says something silly like that, I point out that there are now ZERO scientific institutions that say that manmade actions aren’t a primary cause of the warming we’ve experienced in the past few decades.
Even the American Association of Petroleum Geologists now agrees.
http://greyfalcon.net/whatwouldittake
If there was so much disagreement, that person should be able to find at least 1 institution in the entire world that says otherwise.
And if they can’t find one, then you’ve got to admit, that’s a pretty overwhelming agreement within the scientific community.
25 May 2008 at 11:58 AM
Re Fred Jorgensen @ 22: “How much should we sacrifice for future generations?”
Verses how much should we sacrifice future generations?
25 May 2008 at 12:19 PM
#24, John Mashey: The models _do_ have finite resources of oil and coal. If you look at page 20 you will see that in the reference case, oil and coal prices go up over time despite the improvement in technology happening simultaneously. What you do see is a lot of oil shale and tar sands use. Also, biofuels start being used even in the absence of a carbon price.
Mind you, one can argue that the reference reserve of oil and coal may be too large. And certainly, if today’s oil prices hold for the next decade it will be evidence that the model severely underpredicted oil prices in general. Though one can also argue that we don’t see investments in oil shale and tar sands because of anticipated future climate policy.
In any case, returning to Freeman Dyson’s vision: what he doesn’t get is that without a carbon price, there is no more incentive to develop good carbon eating trees than there is to reduce emissions. So why not place a carbon price on society (either through a tax or a cap) and let society solve it either through bioengineering, conservation, or renewables? Rather than trying to pick the winner now and leaving it up to government to develop it…
25 May 2008 at 12:30 PM
re: #16
==Biochar seems to be an important process in permanently removing carbon in the atmosphere while increasing crop/plant growth:==
But what if Biochar does not work?
What if it has the reverse effect?
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/211036/2352
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/21/15367/8993
25 May 2008 at 12:33 PM
Re, Re#9, David, do you mean conventional oil or all oil inlcuding the so called unconventional heavy oils also known as tar sands and shale ? Some people are stating that estimates here are in the 3 to 5 trillion barrels and alos hard to extract will not stop people trying at $200 a barrel of oil when the light crude begins to top out.
[Response: I meant conventional. You’re right, if you count the tar sands and what not the number goes up considerably. David]
25 May 2008 at 1:24 PM
‘If you look at page 20 you will see that in the reference case, oil and coal prices go up over time despite the improvement in technology happening simultaneously. ….”
In which year of his model does the barrel price hit $138?
25 May 2008 at 1:28 PM
The Scientific American article referred to in #32, + discussion, is at:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-ethics-of-climate-change
I too am bothered by the use of discounting in the GW context. John Broome in Sci Am begins his explanation of the logic of discounting by asserting that: “The costs of mitigating climate change are the sacrifices the present generation will have to make to reduce GHGs”. This seems incorrect to me. Surely we should be considering the GHGs we’re emitting now to represent a growing debt that will have to be repaid in the future (in economic losses due to rising sea-levels etc and/or the costs of actually removing GHGs from the atmosphere), and seeing whether we should discount this debt. Since it’s not usual to write off international debts (e.g. government bonds) even when the generation that created them and benefited from the expenditure has passed away, an analysis based on the idea of a debt being run up by the present generation suggests to me that we shouldn’t be discounting at all. Surely the idea that we can freely emit GHGs now because in the future we’ll be rich enough to deal with the consequences is like the pre-credit crunch logic that we can all afford to take on huge mort-gages because our houses will be worth more in the future. Debts have a nasty habit of getting out of hand.
Prompted by the Sci Am article, I posted more detailed discussion of this idea a few days ago at:
http://unchartedterritory.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/sternly-bemused/
and
http://unchartedterritory.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/still-sternly-bemused/
25 May 2008 at 2:48 PM
Cat Black (23) says, “[#18] “Yes it’s distasteful” No it’s not distasteful, it’s folly. “Distasteful” is when you need to take some medicine or other for your future good, though it is unpleasant at the time, and you do it anyway because you know you will feel better. “Folly” is taking the wrong medicine or none at all because you don’t understand the threat of your illness, and then you die. …”
Your rage is blinding. That’s not what Lou said at all.
25 May 2008 at 3:04 PM
Like Lou above, I also am a card-carrying economist, so you may want to discount what I say (ha ha)…
For the people who think economists have nothing to contribute to this issue, I guess all I can do is remind them that the various solutions being proposed to tackle climate change involve things economic. E.g., a tax on carbon or a cap-and-trade program. The hard sciences alone don’t tell us how many dollars per ton a carbon tax should be, just as it would be ridiculous for an economist to try to calculate that figure without asking help from the climatologists.
As far as discounting for future generations: You need to use a discount rate to make sure you’re helping them as much as possible. It seems that some posters here are objecting not to the discounting per se, but to the conversion of everything to dollars and cents. I have no problem with that objection.
However, if we’re going to quantify future damages from climate change into dollar terms, then we need to discount those numbers to sensibly determine how much it’s worth spending today to try to mitigate those damages. The reason is simple: We could take the money and invest it, giving a larger inheritance to future generations. Discounting makes sense even if the recipient isn’t alive yet. Presumably our grandkids would rather get something worth more than something worth less. And so that’s why it would be silly, say, to spend $900 today to avert $1000 in damages in the year 2100. It would make more sense to take that $900 and buy T-bills, and keep rolling them over for our descendants.
Again, if that talk sounds crazy to you, because “you can’t put a number on climate damage!” OK fair enough. But your problem isn’t with the discounting per se.
[Response: My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation? David]
25 May 2008 at 3:11 PM
I have been hoping that RealClimate would discuss the ideas of William Nordhaus. Unfortunately this review pays more attention to easy targets such as carbon eating trees and Richard Lindzen.
Dyson does a reasonable job on Nordhaus, although I agree that the rest of the review is largely, well, fanciful, factually inaccurate, or maybe the rather unprofessional last word that David used. Dysan does not mention that Nordhaus proposes a $30 per ton carbon tax starting now, increasing to $100 per ton. This is hardly the position of a denialist; it is a lot more than anyone is doing now. It is totally wrong to place him in the same category as Lindzen.
A serious critique of Nordhaus will ask how the costs of climate change are calculated, on which climate change scenario are they based, what are the uncertainties, etc. There is a problem with limiting the timescale to a century when the more serious effects of climate change take place after that. The choice of discount rate can be questioned, but I think it is unrealistic to wish it away to zero, as Stern did.
Nordhaus provides us with a model to evaluate climate change strategies. It is an improvement over the hand waving that is usually done. Climate science uses models to make more rigorous predictions, Economics must do the same. We can criticize the content of the models, but we should not reject the competence of climate science or economics to do their respective jobs.
I hope that RealClimate will make a more serious attempt to deal with this issue. Perhaps you can invite Nordhaus to do a guest commentary.
[Response: There is a lot of guesswork involved in that sort of modeling, but the really big question, as I understand it, is the issue of discounting. David]
[Response: Actually, discounting is not the whole picture. There is considerable difference in the ways damages are calculated (they were higher in Stern). Mike Hanneman from Berkeley has many interesting things to say about this. - gavin]
[Response: So do Don Brown, Nancy Tuana, and others associated with the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute and climateethics.org. For those interested in such matters, I would urge you to check out the site. - mike]
25 May 2008 at 3:34 PM
Tim Joslin (#42): The theory behind discounting is that you are choosing between two uses of your dollar: do you spend the dollar mitigating climate change today, so that you save X dollars in some future time period, or do you use the dollar to invest in some other area with some payback, such that you will be Y dollars richer in the future.
In this case, the future generation will be both the recipient of the X dollars of saving resulting from mitigation, or the Y dollars in income generated from investment, and therefore, there are times when you want to incur a debt of climate damage because of a benefit of a stronger economy.
Of course, this includes a number of assumptions:
1) a dollar saved by not mitigating today does indeed lead to greater wealth in the future. It might also be spent on immediate pleasure: eg, I will pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today (particuarly apt given the role that our demand for beef plays in GHG production). And it has to lead to greater wealth for the population incurring the damage (eg, no fair having America save by less mitigation at the cost of Africa in the future having famines).
2) that mitigation is actually expensive. Some would claim that energy efficiency will actually pay for itself.
3) that the damage in the future is not of catastrophic proportions: eg, it isn’t acceptable to use discounting to argue that saving 1 billion dollars today, at a 5% discount rate, is worth the destruction of the economy in 400 years (if that future economy is worth less than 300 quadrillion dollars). I’ve seen suggested in at least one place (Weitzmann, perhaps?) that the discount rate should be tied to the overall rate of economic growth of the economy: for small perturbations, therefore, assuming the world economy grows at 4% a year, then you discount at 4% per year. However, for perturbations that actually reduce the economic growth rate, you have to start changing the discount rate: if the economic growth rate turns negative, you’d actually start reverse discounting. And of course, if you think that the world economy cannot sustain 4% growth forever, then you’d have to adjust the future discount rate appropriately.
4) That you appropriately value natural resources. What’s the economic value of a lost mountain ecosystem? Not only today, but in 100 years, when presumably the population will be more ecologically sensitive than today’s, if we extrapolate environmental trends?
25 May 2008 at 4:42 PM
re #45, Blair, you state re Nordhaus and his proposals for substantial carbon taxes, that “this is hardly the position of a denialist”.. Quite right, but who has indicated that Nordhaus is (or might be) a “denialist”? I don’t see any indication of that in the article at the top of this thread. I haven’t read Nordhaus’s book (that Dyson reviews), but the question that Nordhaus addresses relates to some sort of “cost-benefit” analysis that incorporates consideration of present costs and benefits and those of future generations. That all seems very reasonable and is exactly what economists should be considering. There probably aren’t any easy answers.
In Nordhaus’s recent Inagural Article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Geography and macroeconomics: New data and new findings; William D. Nordhaus Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 3510-3517 (2006)] he concludes:
“Finally, using the G-Econ
data to estimate the impact of global warming, we estimate that an
equilibrium doubling of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas concentrations
will have significantly more negative impacts than was
found in earlier studies.”
That also doesn’t sound like a “denialist”!
I agree with you that it would be valuable to have a “guested article” by Professor Nordhaus or other economists. Clearly these are issues that physical scientists can impact by careful presentation of data and interpretations concerning changes to the physical environment in a warming world. While the economic impacts might appear obvious in a qualitative sense, policy decisions require an interplay of expertise involving physical science and economic science (or “science”!) and it would be very useful to have some expert insight into the latter as a guest article here.
25 May 2008 at 4:48 PM
Correct me if I’m horribly wrong, but don’t you get increased economic activity from manufacturing and selling compact flourescents, solar panels and wind turbines?
Why can’t mitigating climate change and GHGs produce economic stimulus, rather than be a drag on the economy?
25 May 2008 at 6:01 PM
re: #38 marcus
“#24, John Mashey: The models _do_ have finite resources of oil and coal. If you look at page 20 you will see that in the reference case.”
a) can you point at exactly which page 20 you mean?
b) But, when I said the “standard economic projections appear to totally ignore Peak Oil+Gas”, maybe that was not sufficiently clear, although I thought there was enough context. Let me try again:
The *economic projections* (of GDP) appear to just use some more-or-less constant CAGR… out through 2050 or 2100, whether they say anything or not about finiteness of resources. That seems to imply that real GDP grows with zero impact from having to redo the majority of the world’s energy infrastructure in the next century, just to keep the energy/person from dropping, and world GDP will be 7X higher in 2100. I’ve cited one of the economists who does think that (work = energy * efficiency) matters to GDP.
So, let me try asking one more time, especially of the economists here:
A) DO people (especially the economists) believe that US (world) GDP growth over the next century is essentially unaffected by Peak Oil+Gas? I understand that seems to be the mainstream position, and I do not lightly reject that.
B) If so, can you explain to me why Ayres+Warr, and Charlie Hall are wrong in thinking that energy (or work = energy*efficiency) actually matter for economic growth? Or what high-EROI energy sources you’re expecting to seamlessly replace fossil fuels? I.e., see Charlie Hall’s Balloon Chart on EROI. Two of our friends are ex-Chairman of Shell and ex-Vice-Chair of Chevron, and *they* are seriously worried about what it will take to replace oil fast enough.
=====
MY FEAR IS THAT THE REAL ISSUE IS:
Arguments about discount rates and mitigation cost percentages are less important than:
“Can we go all-out on efficiency and renewables *fast enough* to keep world (US) real GDP at least flat… and not end up, out of desperation, burning a lot more coal to keep the lights on and do CTL synfuels … with bad results.
A really bad scenario could be:
a) We burn fossil fuels *as fast as we can*, rather then *investing* them.
b) And then, it turns out, energy actually matters to real wealth, and the people of 2100 might end up being *poorer* than now, and have to deal with worse climate change.
Anyway, I’d really love for somebody to ease my mind, with *serious* pointers to energy/economics data/papers on this. Thanks.
25 May 2008 at 6:04 PM
Lamont (48) wrote “Why can’t mitigating climate change and GHGs produce economic stimulus, rather than be a drag on the economy?” It can. I opine that it largely will be, due to ingenuity and innovation.
25 May 2008 at 6:45 PM
Marcus (#46), I agree with most of what you say, especially your point 4, which implies the environmental costs of GW damage will actually rise in real terms (a negative discount) and is what we see in practice: e.g. just from the news this weekend, Scotland is prepared to pay to reintroduce beaver after 400 years, and Japan is prepared to recreate wetland from productive agricultural land to reintroduce oriental white storks.
Re. your point 1: the problem is that the “$s saved by not mitigating” are in fact being spent largely on consumption, rather than investment. Your point 2 is valid, of course, and your point 3 is particularly important. If GW ever destroys fixed capital faster than we can create it then we’re in big trouble. And this is entirely feasible if you consider the potential for sea-level rise to lead to the loss of dozens of large cities. OK, it’s not GW, but to illustrate the point, I read that the recent Sichuan earthquake has destroyed 5m buildings - how many months or even years of Chinese construction does this represent?
But my main point is that talking about “mitigation costs” is (IMHO) incorrect. Costs to reduce emissions is a second order term. It’s like my girlfriend telling me to slow down on the motorway (=freeway) and me replying that I’ll stop accelerating. In this analogy, it is my speed per se, not how rapidly it is increasing, that is incurring the cost to me of my girlfriend being annoyed. Hence I’m suggesting it would be better to model GHG emissions as a debt, rather than talk about the costs to reduce the rate at which the debt is accumulating.
Consider Bob Murpy’s numbers (#44): if I have $1400 today I could (A) spend $900 on fossil fuel to heat my home and have $500 left plus a liability of $500 worth of environmental damage at today’s prices that will eventually occur as a result of my GHG emissions or (B) spend $1200 on wind-generated electricity plus $200 left over. My argument is that the $500 worth of damage will increase with GDP, since economic damage caused by GW will be proportionate to the total GDP whenever it occurs (e.g. consider that Stern discusses insurance losses in terms of total global GDP). As the $500 I invest will also increase with GDP, I actually have $0 left in case A. If I’m held accountable for my environmental debt, I’d be better off in case B when at least I’d have the investment proceeds of $200.
Blair Dowden (#45) notes the “problem” of limiting the timescale to a century. Not only is it wrong to assume an arbitrary cut-off point before the GW problem is actually fixed since the climate will still be here, I suggest that the available precedents suggest no time-limit can be assumed for environmental debts if these are accounted for similarly to any other kind of national (or institutional) debt. I’m sure they told me in school that the country is still paying for the Napoleonic Wars (I’m in the UK). I now doubt that this is literally true in a direct sense, but even if it’s not the case that the war bonds issued then are still in circulation, the debt has been rolled over since, or at a minimum the UK has been able to borrow less because it was paying the coupon on those bonds. The point is that the precedents are for perpetual debts. The national accounts of developed nations (& many other classes of institution) have been continuous for centuries.
Also (#45) I understood Stern does not use a zero discount rate, but actually just a “low” one (1.4%). I’m questioning whether the rate should in fact be zero (actually negative because of Marcus’ #46 point 4, as already mentioned, but I don’t want to overplay my hand!).
In summary, it seems to me that talking about “mitigation costs” accepts the classical economic position that environmental externalities can be ignored, which we now know is too simplistic. The idea of “mitigation costs” implies there’s a cost relative to the default case, which is that e.g. GHG emissions are free. This is incorrect - the default case involves costs (and always has done - GHGs from 100 years ago are contributing to our problems, albeit that they are swamped by more recent emissions) that are not at present being fully accounted for. What we have now realised is that we need to internalise these costs and attribute them to those economic activities causing environmental damage, e.g. by imposing carbon taxes. It therefore seems to me that rather than discussing “mitigation costs”, we should be talking about the “carbon debt” being accumulated by those economic activities resulting in GHG emissions.
25 May 2008 at 6:46 PM
I just received my copy of the New York Review with the Dyson article last night and didn’t get to read it until this afternoon.
I was happy to see that Real Climate responded to the article so quickly, but I urge Real Climate to send its post to the New York Review as a letter. The journal has always printed well thought out responses to its articles and offers the writer of the articles a chance to respond.
This would be an excellent opportunity to provide information to those who had just read the Dyson article and might be convinced by it. Also, it would be good to see Mr. Dyson defend his ideas. They are interesting, but not very tightly rooted in any probable reality. I am reminded of a comment by Isaac Asimov that, by World War II all science fiction writers had predicted fully functioning humanoid robots, and none had predicted the computer.
Thanks for an excellent post.
25 May 2008 at 8:47 PM
David wrote:
My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation?
If the ancient Greeks had attained our current level of technology, then right now I think we would all be thousands of times wealthier than we currently are. If the Earth were a bit warmer than it is right now, that would definitely be worth the extra wealth; everyone would turn up the AC in his or her hovercraft on the way to his or her 10-hour-per-week job.
Yes this is a fanciful scenario, but only because you gave me a fanciful assumption and asked about its implications.
There are billions of people who right now lack basic utilities like clean drinking water and dependable electricity. If they are encouraged (forced?) to try to leapfrog over fossil fuels and go right to solar or whatever, their development will be hindered. And hence their grandchildren will be much poorer than under the business-as-usual case.
I used the T-bill example just to make the point, but it doesn’t rely on direct lineage. E.g. you and I benefit right now from the capital accumulation of earlier generations. When people work with tools and equipment, their labor is much more productive than if we all had to start from scratch with just nature and our bare hands.
Obviously, if you think that business-as-usual will lead to catastrophic damages, then a rational response would be to limit GHG emissions in the present, notwithstanding the high cost. But I’m just saying, the way to handle this in economic terms is to realize that the future damages are so high (measured in $$) that, even with discounting, they are still higher than the present costs of mitigation.
One other point: I want to second the statement of a previous poster, that yes Stern actually does discount future climate damages. This is because of the small probability that those generations won’t exist to enjoy the fruits of our current, costly mitigation efforts. E.g. there could be nuclear war, an asteroid could blow up the world in 2025, etc.
But Stern does not allow a “pure” discount rate, where the utility of future generations is discounted simply because of its futurity. So that’s why his overall discount rate is lower than Nordhaus’, who bases his on the market’s observed discount rate.
25 May 2008 at 8:53 PM
David Benson wrote:
Lamont (48) wrote “Why can’t mitigating climate change and GHGs produce economic stimulus, rather than be a drag on the economy?” It can. I opine that it largely will be, due to ingenuity and innovation.
I agree that human ingenuity will always find ways to make a given situation better. But the point is, requiring a reduction in CO2 emissions takes away our range of options. Other things equal, it necessarily makes us poorer.
Now of course, most posters here would say other things aren’t equal. They would say the costs of mitigation are outweighed by the avoided damages of further global warming.
I’m not arguing that point right now. I’m merely saying that it’s not correct to, say, count up the “green jobs” as a benefit of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program. This is because you would have to then include all the jobs that were destroyed (in SUV manufacturing, coal-fired power plants, etc.) by those measures.
If the government passed a law forbidding the production of anything that was yellow, that could only make us poorer. By the same token, if the government says industry has to reduce its carbon emissions by x% next year, in and of itself that makes us poorer.
25 May 2008 at 9:22 PM
re 42, 44, 45, 46, et al. This demonizing of economic discounting is simply astounding. First, for the record, it is accountants who (must) convert everything to dollars and cents, or otherwise ignore it. Economists take a much broader view and include qualitative stuff. They do look at things from an economic point of view — assessing costs and returns, e.g., though not always in monetary units.
Bob Murphy explained discounting in rudimentary easy to understand terms that evidently went flying over many heads here like a jet plane. From what I read here everyone hates discounting because of their presumed outcomes or the guessed-at assumptions that they think might be made by the discounters, as Gavin implied or as Marcus did all over the place (I think). Or like David’s world disaster stemming from the Greeks living it up for 200 years on fossil fuels, though I have no idea what he meant. Marcus says, “…a dollar saved by not mitigating today does indeed lead to greater wealth in the future. …” It should read a dollar saved by not investing in this or that today will give you a dollar + NN cents to invest in a later this or that, which if then costs less that $1.nn proves to be a good deal. But you can’t spend the dollar on a hamburger.
Simply asking the simple question, “what does it cost” really does not taint the whole process in the least. I agree the assumptions should be both quantitative and qualitative and realistically account for all factors and effects in the assessment.. But demonizing “discounting” per se is somewhat like outlawing multiplication.
[Response: I meant that I think discounting breaks when it is applied over time spans long enough that the people who pay the eventual costs in the future are not the same as the people making the decision today. I don’t think people a thousand years from now would benefit from our maximizing our profits, the way that the discounting theory would seem to suggest. Instead I think it’s pretty obvious that they would be harmed by us not cleaning up our messes. I think that reaping benefits now by making a persistent mess is unfair to people in the future, no matter what your discounting may say. It all sounds like so much trickle-down, to me. David]
25 May 2008 at 10:02 PM
re: #51 Tim
“My argument is that the $500 worth of damage will increase with GDP, since economic damage caused by GW will be proportionate to the total GDP whenever it occurs (e.g. consider that Stern discusses insurance losses in terms of total global GDP).”
I’m not sure that’s a completely correct interpretation: I think the damage percentage is likely to be higher, and the cost higher, but for different reasons, notwithstanding Stern Section 19.2.
Please look at the first few paragraphs of post #24. As far as I can tell, Stern does something similar:
a) P.183, footnote 35 says “Extrapolated version of IPCC’s A2 scenario, characterized by annual GDP (per capita) growth of about 1.9%… Annual average population growth is about 0.6%.” I.e., this would be 2.5% total GDP. {I talked to Bert Metz of IPCC, and he said they just got their economic projections from the usual palces like World Bank.]
b)) Some costs may be proportional to GDP.
c) Some costs may be bottom-up rollups of various costs, i.e., like the NRDC report I mentioned. For instance, Stern says “Defending New Orleans alone from flooding during a Category 5 hurricane is expected to cost around $32B.” I don’t think that cost necessarily is proportional to US GDP, although it might well occur that if the cost is that high, but US GDP is not high enough, it won’t be done. Likewise, the costs of managing sea level rise in the SF Bay Area are likely to be whatever they are, rather than just be a percentage of US or world GDP.
d) Anyway, in some cases, costs are *expressed* as percentages, but were derived as c) over a). If a) turns out to be lower:
Category b) will have same percentage, lower total.
Category d) will have same value, higher total.
My other concern is that a great deal of adaptation needs *energy*, and especially pushing dirt and building with steel and concrete, and such activities seem like they’re going to cost more, and are not amenable to Moore’s Law cost reductions.
25 May 2008 at 10:10 PM
Lamont Says:
“Correct me if I’m horribly wrong, but don’t you get increased economic activity from manufacturing and selling compact fluorescent, solar panels and wind turbines?”
This is a common economic misperception because it does not take into account opportunity costs. For example, a boy that breaks the cobbler’s window creates economic opportunities for the glassmaker but that is a false benefit because this money would have been spent by the cobbler on something else.
The economy would have been better off if the cobbler had invested the money in light blubs that would allow him to work later. This would still create some economic opportunities for the glassmaker but it would also improve his productivity and allow him to provide shoes at a lower cost. Repairing a broken window simply forces him to increase his prices to recover the lost money.
Artificially increasing the cost of energy will create economic opportunities for some but the total wealth of the society will go down because their is less money to invest in things that actually improve productivity.
26 May 2008 at 1:12 AM
To build a little on Tim Joslin’s interesting post above, there are two key characteristics of the “climate problem” that conventional economic analysis seems to find difficult. The first is the climate commitment - the fact that there are at present unquantified but inevitable climate changes built into the system as the planet gets back into energy balance. The benefit of mitigation only begins to have effect 20 - 30 years after the expenditure. In that sense, spending on mitigation is rather like making a term deposit in the bank, but with no knowledge of the final payout except a (currently) rather vague notion (in the political domain) that it will be worthwhile. Leave aside the difficulties of dealing with the longer/est term damages. Until we can get a good handle on the near term, it will remain difficult to make good policy decisions. The worst case remains that the tough decisions will not begin to be made until the damage is too obvious to ignore, and that’s when the climate commitment really comes home to roost.
The other issue is to do with the essentially one-way nature of the changes we can see coming. Getting back to 350ppm as Hansen suggests might enable us to stabilise the climate system, but it will not be the same climate we’ve enjoyed over the last few thousand years. We may avoid the worst outcomes, but the damage will still be large. We will not be able to “restore” the Greenland ice cap in any meaningful way, though we might be able to keep a few polar bears alive on an ice reserve in the far north. And how do you put a price on the presence of an ice cap, or a cost on its loss? Clearly, there has to be some concept of natural capital, but as we’re already spending it instead of living (sustainably) on the interest, we have a bigger problem. The “triple crunch”, I believe it has been called: the combined impact of resource depletion (in its widest sense), population growth (9 billion by 2050), and climate change.
Until we get economic assessments that deal with all of those at the same time, we are shooting in the dark.
26 May 2008 at 1:40 AM
Discounting and uncertainty: a non-economist’s view by Steve Sherwood can be found here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j05kv97607nn24rq/fulltext.pdf
26 May 2008 at 1:48 AM
I had a read of Dyson’s article, but haven’t read Nordhaus’s book, so I am not sure how accurate Dyson’s interpretation of Nordhaus’s book is. In a passage from a different book written by Dyson he claims that we should not be too worried by climate change because there are significant uncertainties from getting information from global climate models. What Dyson does not understand is that these uncertainties are actually a reason for more action on climate change. The possibility of low probability catastrophic events, or climate sensitivity being significantly greater than the median predicted value, leads to expected costs that are much greater than would be predicted by conventional cost benefit analysis. As Joe mentioned, there has been some important recent work in this area by Marty Weitzman.
Both the role of uncertainty and an ethical approach to discount rates (where the value of someones life in the future is not significantly less than the value of someones life during the present) undermine Nordhaus’s policy gradualism. There are also uncertainties associated with Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) such as DICE. An IAM could deal with ‘known knowns’ related to climate change, but I have my doubts about how well it would deal with ‘known unknowns’ or ‘unknown unknowns’.
26 May 2008 at 3:37 AM
JCH (#10), Australia is currently receiving more rain than at any point in the records. See the BOM website. Some areas are in drought. Our country has always had drought, and always will do. Google the ‘Federation drought’. Nothing at all to do with supposed climate change, and all to do with a government not willing to take responsibility for water supplies.
26 May 2008 at 3:42 AM
I hope Mr Dyson’s assumptions that Genetic Engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” in a few years are based on better theoretical foundations than those of other scientists who also assumed 60 years ago that Physicists like him would crack the nuclear fusion problem in a few years !
Still waiting for the 50 year technology to come, I’m afraid
26 May 2008 at 4:24 AM
The primary cause of severe climate change is the destruction of the rainforests that form a cooling band around the Earth’s equator. The massive release of carbon that results from cutting down forest trees is far more damaging than the combined greenhouse gas emissions from coal power plants, jet aircraft, ships, trucks and cars.
This is not properganda from environmental activists and committed tree huggers - this startling information comes directly from an authorative report of the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, compiled by the world’s leading rainforest scientists.
The content of the report was handed onto the United Nations and adds credulence to the unprecedented consensus of more than 2000 climate scientists from the International Panel on Climate Change who all agreed, unequivocally, that the war against climate change will be won - or lost - on the trees that we grow and destroy.
Deforestation accounts for around 25 per cent or one quarter of the total global emissions of heat-trapping gases. Transport and industry accounts for just 14 per cent of human-made emissions and aviation only 3 per cent, without taking into account the direct damage of jet fumes being ejected directly into the Earth’s fragile atmosphere.
Is it time to do something?
[Response: These numbers seem off. Deforestation is about 2 Gton C per year, fossil fuel use and other industrial activities are about 8 or 9, according to a recent PNAS paper by Canadell et al, or the IPCC. Volcanic emission is maybe 0.1 Gton C. You’ve got 25% + 14% + 3% = 42%, is the rest natural according to your report? David]
26 May 2008 at 5:42 AM
Fred Jorgensen writes:
Like it or not, physical laws impose limits to growth. We can’t grow our population or our production indefinitely, and we certainly can’t do so at exponentially increasing rates. It’s easy to demonstrate that compound-interest expansion brings us smack up against physical laws in geologically very short periods of time (e.g. 7,000 years or so before population growth must stop, even if we can move anywhere just by wiggling our nose and turn stars and galaxies into food at a whim). In real life we run into obstacles long before that.
A significant fraction of humanity is not prospering. You can’t translate your experience as a middle-class North American or European into world experience.
26 May 2008 at 5:50 AM
Franko writes:
There’s no realistic prospect of that happening in less than a billion years.
26 May 2008 at 6:21 AM
(JBH) I got my B.A. in economics and spent too many years in grad school in economics; I’ve been out of economics for 30 years, so I am rusty. BUT: AFAIK Economics as presently conceived is radically, systemically flawed for dealing with “the environment” and problems thereof. Economists think of “the environment” as a luxury consumer good, when it ought to be thought of as land. Furthermore they mostly ignore land, considering it simply another form of “capital”, assuming that capital and land are perfect substitutes, when in reality they are more often complements. Often they assume waste is nonexistent, NEVER do they model cumulative toxicity. Often they assume “future technology” will give us perfect substitutes for resources that are depleted. They do not consider that “production functions” may change, may BE changed by environmental degradation. Herman Daly is the only economist I have heard of who has seriously faced the question of sustainability, and he is not widely influential.
26 May 2008 at 7:09 AM
The thing I don’t quite get is calling someone who wants to do weird stuff to get rid of carbon emissions a “visionary”, when the real excitement is in moving out of a fossil-fueled world. In computing, we have this thing called Moore’s Law, an example of a learning curve law, which gives us so many times cheaper technology every year. The same is happening with photovoltaics, as well as other renewables. When, on the other hand, you use coal and oil, the price has only one direction to go as demand increases, now that we are starting to hit limits on cheap extraction: up.
What’s so visionary about wanting to find ways to keep oil and coal front and center? I bet people there were people with really visionary ideas about modernizing the horse and buggy in 1908. Pity about that Henry Ford dude.
What we really need is to pump R&D $$ into getting solar and wind down to as close as possible to the cost of coal-fired power generation as soon as possible; limited supply is already making coal more expensive (most types have approximately doubled in cost over the last 12 months). Add on carbon taxes to keep it that way as use of renewables reduces pressure on coal demand. Advances in technology will kill the economic damage bogey. Wind and solar can get cheaper if we make the equipment better; making a better power station won’t make oil or coal cheaper.
“oil shale and tar sands”?? I’m going to invest in a horse whip factory. That was a pretty good business c. 1900. All it needs is a bit of visionary R&D on how to cut the depth of horse manure in the streets.
26 May 2008 at 7:15 AM
Economists have a preference for stating outcomes in currency, which, after all can buy everything. Since much accounting uses this approach to value lives, perhaps in this case, the inverse is appropriate, to evaluate policies by their effects on lives and deaths. Remember, that back in the 60s, the tobacco companies made the calculation that it would be less expensive in dollars to resist bans on tobacco, and there have been millions of lives that ended prematurely since. They were right.
Climate change denial and now delay follows the same course, Nordhaus’ business has not been to deny but to value inaction cheaply and encourage delay. That string having run out, he now retreats to slow action. Unlike slow food that will leave a bitter taste.
The real problem with doing nothing now will be the cost in lives not air conditioning later. That means you, your kids and the rest
26 May 2008 at 8:34 AM
The issue of economic efficiency in the context of AGW fervor is important. Do we impose economically harmful policies that have no meaningful impact on CO2 levels (Kyoto, Stern) just because it feels good to ‘do something’ and impose pain on the untenured materialistic masses?
The snarky dismissal of Dyson’s thoughts about CO2-eating trees would be more convincing if it were not delivered from the standpoint of an even more distant location in wishful-thinking land: Solutions based on massive world-wide carbon policy mandates [edit] is far more fanciful than any science-fiction style technological approach to AGW.
[Response: Obviously spending money for no good purpose is pointless so suggesting that this is what anyone is advocating is a strawman argument. As for the rest of your comment, it appears completely divorced from the reality of what anyone is seriously proposing. If you are of the opinion that nothing could possibly work and therefore there is no point trying (whether that is a carbon tax, cap-and-trade, mandates to improve energy efficiency, a switch of subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables etc.), then say so and then we can ignore you. If that isn’t the case, constructively add to the discussion by talking about what you think might work. The ‘wishful thinking’ is associated with people who think that simple criticism makes the whole problem go away. It doesn’t. - gavin]
26 May 2008 at 8:38 AM
This series of comments pretty much makes Dyson’s point. Almost all of the commenters begin with the assumption that the science is settled and then set out to demonize Dyson for claiming it is not and for pointing out that standard economic analysis (presented by Nordhaus) does not support the political agenda of Stern/Gore et al. The two points made by skeptics are: (1) the models are imprecise and fail to take into account complex interactions in the biosphere, and (2) the proponents of more radical regulatory regimes to counter global warming fail to take into account standard economic analysis of costs and benefits. Those two points remain largely unrebutted in (what sounds to me like) the quasi-religious dialogue prevalent in this forum. Suppose that you are a true skeptic trying to get to the right answer and then re-read the above posts. Believe me, you will not be convinced.
[Response: The two points you make have been quite thoroughly addressed, but you weren’t paying attention. First, regarding Nordhaus, how is it that the same people who are so ready to point out problematic aspects of climate modelling are completely convinced by the kind of economic models that Nordhaus uses? His analysis doesn’t even take the baby steps toward incorporating the probability distribution of harm that Weitzman’s model uses, and if you think that climate models have some aspects that are difficult to get right, you ought to have a look at RICE and DICE. Besides that, there’s the highly questionable issue of the discount rate assumed by Nordhaus and many other economists. David addressed that specifically in his post. Regarding the biosphere, there is in fact a great deal of work on the land carbon cycle, and Dyson is being far too much of a techno-optimist. While there is some chance that the biosphere might moderately increase it’s carbon uptake (which would somewhat delay doubling of CO2), the science also supports a very real possibility that the biosphere will turn around and become a net source of carbon, adding further to the carbon due to fossil fuel burning. That is a real disaster scenario, and it’s not one that can be discounted. It happend once before in a warming world. During the PETM, the biosphere released up to 6000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, in the form of CO2. –raypierre]
26 May 2008 at 9:26 AM
The real problem with doing nothing now will be the cost in lives not air conditioning later. That means you, your kids and the rest.
But this is also the “real problem” with severe restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. As I said earlier, there are billions of people who don’t have what we consider to be necessities of life. They really are dying every day in ways directly traceable to this lack.
So if your criterion is, “Minimize the number of premature deaths over the next 200 years” or something like that, it doesn’t automatically follow that a massive carbon tax now is the answer. It could be the answer, but it is an empirical question. Many posters here are acting as if altruism for others necessarily implies support for radical curbs on carbon emissions, when it doesn’t. You would have to (a) care about future generations, and (b) agree with some of the more catastrophic predictions, in order to support radical measures today.
On the issue of discounting, I agree that on the face of it, it sounds crazy to even ask, “How many future people are worth one person today?” But as I tried to get across (obviously not very persuasively) in earlier posts, the fact is that the price of current purchasing power is higher than (right now) the price of purchasing power in the year 2100. So there needs to be some discount rate (and people can argue about how high it should be) to make sure present mitigation efforts are as effective as they can be.
One final note: I am not saying that the psychological motivation of most “deniers” is concern for people dying of dysentery in Africa today. Of course not. But even so, it is a fact that there are people we know are dying today from poverty. Their efforts to climb out of poverty will be hampered by mitigation proposals. So it’s not simply a matter of, “Do you value human lives?” It’s an empirical an ethical issue of, “Is allowing x more people to die for sure over the next 20 years, counterbalanced by models that lead us to believe we will thus save x+y people over the next 200 years?”
Incidentally I am not being sarcastic in writing the above. The answer may very well be “yes, it is worth it.” I’m only trying to show that it is a question of balance, to quote Nordhaus. It’s not simply, “Do I value my SUV more than 80 kids 100 years from now?”
26 May 2008 at 9:35 AM
It is very easy to put a cost on climate change. Take the maps of infrastructure location. Takes the maps of sea level rise at one metre increments. overlap the maps. Knock out each infrastructure node that gets engulfed. add in a cost to rebuild that node at higher ground. sum the costs of node builds. that’s zeroth order estimate. go to first order estimate by examining follow-on effects into supply chains etc. go to next order by … etc. every study that I am aware of has trivialised the cost of climate change.
[Response: Don’t forget that the cost of climate change is more than just in goods traded in markets. Human suffering, species extinction, loss of ecosystems — some economists have methods to put dollar values on these,but they are all questionable. Amartya Sen favors considering costs more broadly, and not just aggregating them all into currency. Take a look at some of his essays in “Rationality and Freedom.” –raypierre]
26 May 2008 at 10:10 AM
Re: #68 Yes. How good is that money when there’s nothing to buy? Check out the latest issue of Fine Homebuilding and the price builders are paying for old growth timber for its structural and aesthetic values. America’s virgin timberlands were low-valued and wasted at that time. Today, things are different. How much are our grandkids going to be willing to pay for a cool breeze, trees, (I’m channeling Pink Floyd here) and a bit of decent summer weather?
26 May 2008 at 11:18 AM
My understanding of the Project Orion was based on the suprising discovery that nuclear explosions can have a pronounced direction. The stand that one of the early explosions was raised on was almost completely undamaged following an explosion. I’m sure that the bomb makers — and the general public — had expected that the blast would develop like a star expanding in all directions at once. If the destructive, chaotic energy goes thataway then an equal force, which theoretically could be channeled, goes the opposite way. Building a ship rigorous enough to withstand the unimaginable acceleration with all of its other systems intact would probably be beyond engineering, but it’s not prima facie ludicrous.
26 May 2008 at 11:20 AM
Greg (#61):
As is made explicit in numerous reports by the Australian Bureau of Meterology (eg. here) and is very apparent in their maps and other data presentations (eg. here) the national rainfall averages obscure the fact that there have been trends toward a considerable increase in rainfall in the Australia’s tropical north west and devastating decreases in the south west and south east. This, in combination with significant increases in temperature that have increased evaporation, has lead to record minimum inflows to streams and rivers in the south, including to the entire Murray Darling Basin which is in a parless state.
If you are an Australian then I’m sure that you are aware of all this. Why try to misrepresent the dire nature of the reality with which our nation is struggling to cope? Hopefully, by some miracle all the climatologists are wrong. But it is a very slim hope to cling to. I’m no climatologist, but having intently followed the debate here and elsewhere it has become very clear to me that the climate scientists know what they are doing, are honest and that their science is very coherent, clear and supported by the data. By contrast, the denialist PR is self contradictory and is clearly spun and twisted in a deceitful attempt to confuse the lay public.
Would it not be prudent to accept that the trends we are seeing are probably the early signs of the predicted global warming, to acknowledge that it is very likely to continue to get worse in the manner that the scientists predict, and to start acting now to both limit and adapt to it?
26 May 2008 at 11:27 AM
26 May 2008 at 11:40 AM
Actually it was an economic question. The mostly coal burning north-eastern mercantile interests in the United States were opposed to the Antebellum South’s cotton trade with England. I object to your insinuation that Northern monopoly capitalism was motivated by some ulterior moral purpose of which there is no evidence.
[edit - keep on topic and don’t personalize criticisms]
26 May 2008 at 12:26 PM
Taking his lead from Nordhaus, Dyson writes, “Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground.”
I’m sure genetic engineering holds many surprises in store for us, but, being the non-visionary type that I am, I just can’t imagine giant, non-biodegradable roots or tubers being a feasible means of carbon sequestration, even if they could be created. Aside from the logistical problems (Where would these GM-trees be planted? In place of what? At what cost, and to whom? What happens when the giant turnip-like roots start to fill up the ground, or impact aquifers, or infiltrate sewer systems?) Given the current opposition to fairly innocuous GM crops (e.g., http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gmfood/overview.php), it’s not clear why Nordhaus and Dyson at all confident that society will embrace GM-trees having the capability of altering our atmosphere and possibly our climate?
Dyson also writes, “Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp.” Perhaps, but this unbridled optimism strikes me as far more speculative than the GCMs that skeptics keep trying to refute.
26 May 2008 at 1:17 PM
Issues of practicality aside, is it just me or does anyone else find the idea of genetically a carbon eating/sequestering life form a terrifying stupid idea? What happens if this organism is out there in the wild and CO2 levels have dropped to pre-industrial levels?
[Response: The answer is that you trigger a Snowball Earth. –raypierre]
26 May 2008 at 1:21 PM
Re #53:
Bob Murphy, this seems interessting. Let’s assume that the world was 2500 BT (before today) at the same point as now.
The emission would be 9GtC/yr at a growing rate of 3.3%/yr in 2500 BT(, without deforestation).
Which emission of carbon to the atmosphere would you suggest in your case for the time from 2500 BT to today? Maybe you can give a list with values every 100 yr or so for interpolation.
Uli
26 May 2008 at 1:21 PM
Bob Murphy wrote: “There are billions of people who right now lack basic utilities like clean drinking water and dependable electricity. If they are encouraged (forced?) to try to leapfrog over fossil fuels and go right to solar or whatever, their development will be hindered.”
You assert that “their development will be hindered” but you offer no reason to believe that this would be so. And there is evidence that the opposite is true: that rapidly deploying clean, renewable energy technologies and avoiding destructive fossil fuels is not a hindrance but the key to sustainable development in the poor world.
With regard to dependable electricity for example, the fastest growing technologies for generating electricity worldwide — by far — are photovoltaics and wind turbines. According to Worldwatch Institute, global production of PV panels increased 51 percent and wind-generating capacity increased 27 percent in 2007 alone, continuing multi-year double-digit growth rates for both technologies.
In many cases, small-scale distributed photovoltaic and wind-generated electricity is proving to be the most cost-effective and fastest path to rural electrification in the developing world, where the financial, technological and industrial resources to build large centralized power plants of any kind, and the grids to distribute their electricity, don’t exist. Wealthy-nation support for the rapid dissemination of such technologies in the developing world leads directly and powerfully to creating a better quality of life for people there, and also reduces the growth in emissions from electricity generation.
With regard to clean drinking water, anthropogenic global warming is a grave threat to the drinking water supplies of billions of people all over the world. Ending global warming is an absolutely urgent necessity for preserving drinking water supplies.
26 May 2008 at 1:25 PM
In response to post #70, raypierre wrote:
The two points you make have been quite thoroughly addressed, but you weren’t paying attention….Besides [Nordhaus’ dubious model], there’s the highly questionable issue of the discount rate assumed by Nordhaus and many other economists. David addressed that specifically in his post.
Hang on a second. The following is David’s addressing of the issue of discount rates:
I personally can get my head around the concept of discounting if the time span is short enough that it’s the same person on either end of the transaction, but when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now.
There’s no polite way I can say this, but the above is honestly analogous to me (an economist) criticizing the IPCC at a website like WeHateGore.org and saying, “Personally, I don’t see why we should put any faith in these models. They can’t even tell me if it’s going to rain next week, so when the time scale goes to hundreds or thousands of years…!”
So whatever your thoughts on discounting, David’s expression of personal confusion over the practice of economists hardly counts as a thorough disposal of the practice.
And yes, some people pointed to Weitzman’s work, and the RFF paper. Again, this is analogous to me pointing to Lindzen and saying, “Look, even an MIT expert on this stuff agrees with me! These models are bunk!”
It’s hard to keep the different objections separate on this thread. As I keep pointing out, a lot of people here don’t like the idea of using dollar measurements in the first place, in which case the discussion of discounting is superfluous.
But if you are prepared to accept that a cost/benefit test of proposed mitigation measures isn’t absurd, then the next step is to ask whether future costs and benefits should be given equal weight to present ones.
And I’m saying the answer is no, because whether we agree with it or not, the market right now undervalues future dollars. So we can achieve our aims more cheaply by recognizing this basic fact, rather than declaring it immoral.
I’ll try one more analogy to get the point across. Suppose there is a homeowner trying to decide whether to spend $1000 renovating the insulation in his house, in order to save $100 on utility bills per year. Should he do it or not?
If David is right, then before we can answer that question, we need to know how old the homeowner is. After all, if he’s going to die in two years, then clearly the expenditure isn’t worth it, right?
(The standard answer of course is no, the age of the homeowner is irrelevant, assuming he wants to pass on as much wealth as possible to his heirs. They will reap the benefits of the efficient purchase of insulation. They would rather get the insulated home, and $800 less in cash, than the non-insulated home, and $800 more in cash. [The $200 comes from the two years of life left in the homeowner, in which he lowers his utility bills from the new insulation.])
[Response: There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time. There is a difference and pretending that only the economically illiterate think so, is not constructive. It is however an ethical decision, and can’t be proven one way or another using economics alone. - gavin]
26 May 2008 at 1:28 PM
One final comment, and then I think I should quit while I’m ahead (or not too far behind): Nordhaus is actually on “your” side in this. He has been one of the most vocal economists on the importance of climate change.
If you think he is unduly activist, it might be because, as a professional economist, he sees costs of your personally favored policies that you aren’t considering.
26 May 2008 at 1:52 PM
Whoops–typo: I meant above to say that if you think Nordhaus’ isn’t activist enough, then it might be because he is worrying about drawbacks to mitigation policies that you aren’t taking seriously. I.e. there seems to be a sense here that because he’s skeptical of some approaches, he must not care about the environment as much as Gore (or Stern) does. And I don’t think that’s it at all. Believe me, I have been a critic of Nordhaus on this very issue, so it’s odd that I’m defending him here.
26 May 2008 at 2:40 PM
@8 - There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the Orion concept. It might not be the best engine design we have (and would probably never be usable in our atmosphere) but it is a good idea.
We should take our own advice, and stick to talking about our areas of expertise - leave the nuclear physics to the nuclear physicists ;).
Generally, I imagine that the trees Dyson talks about are probably somewhere in our future - the question is whether the trees would come quick enough to stop problems if we just go on with business as usual.
There is no reason not to pursue ideas like this - all ideas should be pursued to some degree. The danger lies in reliance upon one solution alone.
26 May 2008 at 2:54 PM
I don’t know what Dyson’s area of expertise is in physics, but imagine if one of us started trying to act as if we understood it in reviewing technical publications dealing with it!
26 May 2008 at 2:54 PM
Well shoot, I said I was done pestering you guys, but then Gavin goes and makes a great analogy that I hope will really clarify our different positions on this. So if you’ll forgive me for one more attempt:
There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time.
OK thanks, as I said this really crystallized our differences on this. Note that we’re actually closer to agreement than you seem to think; all along I have said, “If you don’t want to put a dollar value on lives or the environment, that’s fine. But if you do then you need to discount.” I think we’re both agreed, then, that the basic problem with Nordhaus is his attempt to monetize everything, rather than his application of a discount rate to those monetary values.
But anyway, back to your example: First of all, under the law you will get a lighter sentence (today) for planting a bomb set to go off in one year, than if you planted one that went off two minutes ago. And the difference of course is that you haven’t actually killed anybody with the first bomb. This is relevant to the climate discussion, because those future harms might not actually occur. And I don’t even mean, maybe carbon-munching trees will be developed. As I said, Stern discounts the future because of the possibility that those people won’t exist (asteroid, nuclear war, etc.).
(Now in fairness, you could say, “OK, if the bomb is set to go off in one week, versus one year.” I don’t know what the legal treatment of these cases would be, but in either case you would not be charged with murder, because no one is yet dead.)
But now let’s make your bomb scenario a little closer to the climate change one, and hopefully you’ll see why I keep insisting that discounting is important. Suppose that instead of just an outright government crackdown on bomb-planting, the government capitulates to the bomb lobbyists and only imposes a $35 tax on every bomb planted. (Maybe most citizens view bomb planting as essential to their way of life.)
Now in that case, it really would be crazy to not discount the fine based on the timer setting, because otherwise the same crime would be penalized at different levels. E.g. someone today plants a bomb set to go off in one year, and he gets fined $35. Then next year, someone plants a bomb to go off in 24 hours, and he also gets fined $35.
Both bombers killed one person in the year 2009. But the first bomber paid a higher fine, because he had to pay $35 in 2008, while the second guy had to pay it in 2009. During his trial, the first guy in 2008 could have said, “Hang on a second! Don’t make me pay it now, make me pay the $35 when it actually kills someone.” And naturally he would prefer that outcome, because he could set aside less than $35 today (in 2008 when he’s convicted), and let it roll over to $35 in 2009 when his bomb actually causes damage.
So that’s one way of seeing why, if you’re going to bring monetary incentives into it, which plenty of environmentalists want to do, then it matters that “current money” is more expensive than “future money.”
To insist that monetary fees (carbon taxes, prices for cap-and-trade permits, etc.) reflect the prevailing exchange rate between present and future dollars, is no crazier than saying a carbon tax expressed in Japanese yen has to be higher per ton than a carbon tax expressed in US dollars.
To push the bomb analogy even further, yes it certainly would be better if the bomb planters could be persuaded to set their timers farther into the future, even if we’re solely concerned about minimizing the damages from their actions. This is because we have more time to adapt to the bombs. People in the vicinity can move away, they can buy armor for their cars, etc.
Obviously I’ve carried the analogy a bit far, but I’m just trying to show that the closer you make it to the actual situation of carbon emissions causing future damages, and especially where the government’s response is to inflict monetary fines on the parties doing the damaging, then you need to use discounting. Otherwise you end up with an outcome that is inferior from everyone’s viewpoint, to what would be achievable if discounting were used.
[Response: My point was only that ethics are not discountable. It is equally unethical to plant the bomb with a one day setting as with a century setting. Your extension to my analogy is really a stretch to make an ethical point into an economic point - I don’t see that any of your additional assumptions are necessarily valid. But nonetheless, there are clear uncertainties with future actions that mean that something that is almost certain to happen if I plan it for a day ahead, is less certain if I plan for a century ahead. Fine - some kind of allowance needs to be made for that (as Stern does). But there is no reason to think that it should be the same discounting rate that applies to today’s monetary investment decisions. - gavin]
26 May 2008 at 4:41 PM
Bob Murphy (54) — Unfortunately you are simply assuming that releasing fossil carbon is completely harmless. Just because there was no dollar cost or penalty associated with doing so (before cap-n-trade or offset schemes) does not mean that real harm was not being done.
We try to penalize those who introduce toxic wastes into the environment. By your argument, that makes us poorer. Sorry, but you have just illustrated why I put very little credence into anything economists say anymore.
26 May 2008 at 4:45 PM
Freeman Dyson is wrong on all counts. It’s pretty amazing to read this, actually.
Take the fastest-growing carbon absorbing plants on the planet - sugarcane and bamboo. It is highly implausible that any feat of genetic engineering will increase those ratea of carbon assimilation. Genetic engineering has a very poor track record so far, in any case. Yields are not any higher, and most of the interest so far has been in creating patented and paired herbicide/GMO plant combinations, like RoundUp Ready Soybeans and the like. No amount of genetic engineering is going to make plants grow without water, or while under ten feet of floodwater.
The carbon that has been added to the atmosphere was added slowly, over a hundred years, from millions and millions of engines and boilers and furnaces, and any realistic plan to “remove it” is going to have to take place over similar timescales - and what, exactly, is the economic incentive for burying carbon? If all carbon-trading credits were limited to actual geological burial of carbon in a fixed, stable form (such as, say, petroleum), then they really would help - but noone is doing that (CO2 gas is not a stable long-term storage form).
If we could come up with a technology that used solar power to convert water and carbon dioxide to something like crude oil, then we could pump the crude oil back into the original oil wells (maybe). If that sounds ludicrous, it is because it is - but it is less ludicrous than the tree notion.
Even if we did have these hypothetical “carbon eating trees”, they’d still have to be cut down and buried - because if you cut down a tree and walk away, around 99% of the carbon will end up right back in the atmosphere where it came from. If you plow the carbon into the soil, it will stay for hundreds of years, give or take. To bring atmospheric CO2 down to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm would require the burial of how many gigatons of charcoal from these trees?
Keep in mind that right now, fossil fuel carbon emission rates are as high as they have ever been in human history (at 8 gigatons or so) - and are increasing, even accelerating: http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/CO2/2008.htm
So, an acre of sugarcane can produce as much as 40 tons of cane (30 seems more likely). Brazil currently has 14 million acres of sugarcane. That works out to around half a billion tons - and since a gigaton is a billion tons, we would need 16 Brazils, growing sugarcane around the clock and burying it all in large pits, to offset the current global fossil fuel emissions.
However, one ton of sugarcane delivers only 250 kg of bagasse, the woody portion, so multiply all the above numbers by four. All we need to offset current global fossil fuel CO2 emissions are 64 Brazils… Hmmmm…. this does not seem possible, does it? How will we dig all the big pits needed, for starters? What will the farm laborers eat (there will be no room for growing food)?
As far as relying on econometric models and “GDP projections” - that’s not even wrong. If econometric models were ever subjected to the kind of scrutiny that climate models have been subjected to, the entire field would be revealed for what it is - a complete farce. There’s a very good reason that economists never set foot in physical science departments, after all.
What is needed is massive investment in solar and wind technology and electrical grid storage infrastructure, as well as massive investment in undoing the disastrous “Green Revolution” in industrial agriculture and figuring out how to make out agricultural systems carbon-neutral, at the very least, if not actually carbon negative.
26 May 2008 at 5:25 PM
re #87 Bob Murphy
I have the Nordhaus book on order, but obviously haven’t read it yet, since it’s not out, and from reading Nordhaus After Kyoto and Wikipedia I see:
“To convert from carbon units to the current convention of CO2 units, multiply the mass, or divide the price by 3.67 and “$100 tax per ton of carbon is equal to a tax of $27 per ton of CO2″.
1 gallon gas ~ 20 lbs of CO2
1 ton CO2 ~~ 100 gallons of gas or diesel
$100 per ton carbon = $27.2 / ton CO2 = $.27/gallon, considered a “relatively high” rate, whereas Nordhaus in the above proposes $16/ton for 2010, a $.04 / gallon tax. I’m all for carbon taxes in general, BUT…
From Dyson’s review, Nordhaus’ analyses sound like they resemble the others:
1) Project GDP growth forward 100-200 years, usually with some CAGR based on past CAGRs, and typically around 2-3%. This yields a reference case that in no obvious way depends on energy, or specifically Peak Oil&Gas.
2) Then look at various scenarios, including things like carbon taxes that are presumed to raise prices, discourage usage, and therefore reduce the growth of the economy.
PLEASE, as an economist, can you explain to me why the following can make even the slightest sense together:
1) Everybody worries about carbon taxes, i.e., Nordhaus says that $16/ton is the right number for 2010 ($.04/gal), rising to $100/ton ($.27/gal) affecting the economy. This sounds to me like:
modestly higher fuel prices hurt the economy, if created by taxes, but may be needed to avoid future costs
2) Oil&Gas production falling to 50% of current over next 50 years has *no* effect on the economy and is irrelevant to reference projections of the future and can mostly be ignored. This sounds to me like:
substantially higher fuel prices caused by supply-reduction are irrelevant
====
How does that work?
26 May 2008 at 5:40 PM
Ike Solem (89) — After deeply buying 8.5–9 GtC per year just to stay even, then deeply burying another 385 GtC or so gets us back to about 315 ppm CO2.
The biomass could be carbonized via pyrolysis with the valuable oils saved for fuel. The biochar (usually called charcoal when the biomass is woody) then has a higher proportion of just carbon.
Doing some of this might be sensible.
26 May 2008 at 5:53 PM
As another economist, I’d like to make a comment (I must say that I have really appreciated Bob Murphy’s contributions).
There are (at least) three reasons for discounting, all of them reasonable but disputable. (I realise that some of what follows has already been discussed, but I’m trying to clarify.)
First, there is increasing affluence, which means that on averge an increment to income next year will add less to well-being than an increment today. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that average world affluence (skating over the big problems of averaging) is growing by 3% p.a. Well-being will be growing rather more slowly (since as we get richer each increment to income would be expected to add less to well-being). This might point to a discount rate of say 2% per annum - provided we are confident that affluence will CONTINUE to increase. However, if there is a risk of big reductions in affluence and well-being in future, then we might reasonably pay a lot now to “insure” against that eventuality.
Second, there is the risk of species annihilation, which means we should “enjoy it while we can”……this argument seems valid, but the risks are very difficult to quantify and the argument justifies only a very low discount rate.
Third is “impatience” - the simple fact that people prefer a given increment to income now than in a year’s time, irrespective of whether affluence is increasing.
This third reason seems to me to raise lots of thorny issues. On the one hand, it could be argued that in a democracy, this is the end of the story. People’s savings and investment decisions reflect their ethical choices and governments should simply respect that. On the other hand, it could be argued either that ethics trumps democracy, or that in a democracy, ethical choices are articulated throught democratic processes rather than market ones. Pass.
But there is a further complication, to which a number of comments have referred. If people’s imatiences is expressed in market transactions, then the use of any dscount rate other than the market one will be wasteful (I think this is Nordhaus’s position). This is because benefits (and therefore well-being) could always be increased by diverting investment away from those mitigation measures which would be justified at a discount rate lower than the market one. However, this seems contentious. It raises the issue of the temporal distribution of benefits. As Gavin points out, how does one ensure that future generations are compensated for climate-induced damage when investments are generally (relatively) short lived? The only answer seems to be that growing faster now results in a more rapid accumulation of knowledge which is then passed on to future generations, resulting in greater productivity and affluence for them. But this seems to me to be a potentially flimsy legacy, particularly over the very long run.
Basic point: discounting is justifed if we can be reasonbly confident that future generations will be more affluent than the present one (and also to allow for the small risk of species annhilation). But over anything other than the short term this seems to point to a relatively low discount rate (a la Stern, who, as several people have pointed out, does NOT argue against discounting in general). Discounting for impatience looks “iffy” at best. And the critical issue is the risk of catastrophe (short of species annhilation). If there is a big risk of this occuring from climate change (relative to other risks such as asteroids, diseases, etc), then a very low discount rate might be justified. This issue reprsents the boundary between science and economics, and should be a top priority for future research.
26 May 2008 at 6:32 PM
26 May 2008 at 6:36 PM
Comment #70 by Dave Raskin, states in part:”The two points made by skeptics are: (1) the models are imprecise and fail to take into account complex interactions in the biosphere, and…..”
The global warming over the past 3 and a half to four decades is based on direct observation not climate models.
He also refers to a “quasi religious” dialogue. Dyson also mentions religion in his review in connection with environmentalism. In response to Reverend Dyson, not wanting to foul our nest isn’t a religious belief among most who are concerned with a clean environment. We use out bathrooms not for worship but to ensure our health and our homes’ very habitability.
26 May 2008 at 6:50 PM
I haven’t read all these posts yet but figured I’d add my two cents since it wasn’t in the top posting. Dyson dismissed solar power along with Nordhaus as being a currently nonexistent technology then goes on to propose carbon sequestration via genetic engineering. To me, that seems a peculiar way of looking at things, but then I’m no Freeman Dyson.
Another comment regarding this review. I search for everything that Dyson writes because he’s smart as hell. His view on global warming is changing. Before he wrote that the climate scientists are “arm chair scientists” whose simulations didn’t include the mud, the dirt, the dust, the biology, … all this stuff that we don’t fully understand. To my ear, this review struck a very different chord than say what he wrote in “A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe.” I wonder if he was corrected by some field climatologist who take ice cores or who tromps around in the Himalayas or Greenland measuring glaciers ?
26 May 2008 at 7:02 PM
Re #45: Thank you, Gavin, for the Hanemann response to Nordhaus. This is the kind of criticism I am looking for. I wonder if Nordhaus has a response to this?
Perhaps some of the economists here can help me out the the statement on page 64 comparing a carbon tax with emission caps, that “quantity regulation is better than price regulation if the marginal benefit curve [to reducing climate change] is steeper than the marginal cost curve [of mitigation measures].”
It seems to me that the issue is how high the carbon tax should be. Quantity controls without a trading scheme are a windfall to producers (ie. oil companies). And an emission trading scheme is always going to be less efficient than a carbon tax.
26 May 2008 at 7:37 PM
BTW Nordhaus’ book is available at his website (.pdf).
26 May 2008 at 7:48 PM
David, Great post, but I’m unsure that the following is correct:
“Release a slug of CO2 and you will increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years.”
About 30% of current annual emissions are, in effect, annually stored in terrestrial ecosystems and the ocean. In the case of the ocean, the turnover time of this CO2 is long enough to be considered out of the contemporary cycle. Cut emissions to zero and wouldn’t there be an immediate drop in CO2, with continuously dropping concentrations until a new “steady-state” was reached?
I learned at one point that within 200 years atmospheric CO2 would return to pre-industrial levels, if we cut our emissions to zero. I’ve been repeating this since (gulp).
Is this just wrong…Anyone?
thanks
26 May 2008 at 8:04 PM
Craig (#75),
Australia has always had drought, and again there is absolutely nothing exceptional about the current state. You speak of “record minimum inflows to streams and rivers in the south, including to the entire Murray Darling Basin which is in a parless state.”
As can be seen here, that is wrong. The Murray-Darling gets as much rainfall as ever. No discernable trend. On the same page, you will see that Southern Australia is up on rainfall, South-Eastern is on a downwards trend, but in just about every possible region, rainfall is up compared to early in the 20th century.
There is nothing radically different about any of the rainfall patterns currently in Australia. There are just more people taking water out of the rivers and lakes. No need for a [edit] climate change explanation.
26 May 2008 at 8:27 PM
This Biochar technology represents the most comprehensive, low cost, and productive approach to long term stewardship and sustainability.Terra Preta Soils a process for Carbon Negative Bio fuels, massive Carbon sequestration, 1/3 Lower CH4 & N2O soil emissions, and 3X Fertility Too.
UN Climate Change Conference: Biochar present at the Bali Conference http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/steinerbalinov2107
SCIAM Article May 15 07;
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=5670236C-E7F2-99DF-3E2163B9FB144E40
After many years of reviewing solutions to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) I believe this technology can manage Carbon for the greatest collective benefit at the lowest economic price, on vast scales. It just needs to be seen by ethical globally minded companies.
The main hurtle now is to change the current perspective held by the IPCC that the soil carbon cycle is a wash, to one in which soil can be used as a massive and ubiquitous Carbon sink via Charcoal. Below are the first concrete steps in that direction;
S.1884 – The Salazar Harvesting Energy Act of 2007
A Summary of Biochar Provisions in S.1884:
Carbon-Negative Biomass Energy and Soil Quality Initiative
for the 2007 Farm Bill
http://www.biochar-international.org/newinformationevents/newlegislation.html
There are 24 billion tons of carbon controlled by man in his agriculture and waste stream, all that farm & cellulose waste which is now dumped to rot or digested or combusted and ultimately returned to the atmosphere as GHG should be returned to the Soil.
If you have any other questions please feel free to call me or visit the TP web site I’ve been drafted to co-administer. http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=node
It has been immensely gratifying to see all the major players join the mail list , Cornell folks, T. Beer of Kings Ford Charcoal (Clorox), Novozyne the M-Roots guys(fungus), chemical engineers, Dr. Danny Day of EPRIDA , Dr. Antal of U. of H., Virginia Tech folks and many others.
26 May 2008 at 9:02 PM
Re #96: “quantity regulation is better than price regulation if the marginal benefit curve [to reducing climate change] is steeper than the marginal cost curve [of mitigation measures].”. This is based on Weitzman’s 1974 paper Prices vs. Quantities. My interpretation of this paper is that if there was no uncertainty it would not matter whether you regulated a price or a quantity, because you would know what quantity related to what price and so on. Weitzman shows that the above proposition holds when there is an uncertainty parameter. He assumes that this parameter is small, which may not be case, as suggested by his recent work on uncertainty and catastrophic climate change. I’m not sure what implications this has for the prices vs quantities question.
26 May 2008 at 9:12 PM
#98 on the lifetime of CO2
It takes around 500-1000 years for the ocean to remove 80% of the CO2 pulse, but there’s in fact a tail that extends for at least 10,000 years. Only a small part is removed relatively rapidly.
Dr. Archer has a paper on this
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.fate_co2.pdf
and also
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/montenegro.2007.fate_CO2.pdf
26 May 2008 at 9:12 PM
Re #98 (jvoe): The “hundreds of thousands of years” assertion is explained here.
26 May 2008 at 9:45 PM
Re #89 Ike Solem,
LOL,funny you should say that.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-clothes
March, 2008
The Economist Has No Clothes
Unscientific assumptions in economic theory are undermining efforts to solve environmental problems
By Robert Nadeau
26 May 2008 at 10:52 PM
re: Biochar
Except when Biochar has the opposite effect, and actually increases carbon emissions by speeding up decomposing bacteria growth.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/211036/2352
And ultimately, it doesn’t really represent a significant long term storage method, unless you we’re going to propose “reverse coal mining” with charcoal. Which of course would be ludicrously expensive due to the cost of transporting bulky material.
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/03/logistics-problem-of-cellulosic-ethanol.html
Even more expensive than CCS, which already looks to be a “castles in the sky” approach.
Which would transport a liquid through pipelines.
http://us.greenpeace.org/site/PageNavigator/CCS_is_a_dangerous_distraction
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/futuregen-clean.html
_
re: Nordhaus
As for putting Nordhaus in the same category as Lindzen, I’d say that’s entirely appropriate.
[edit - wrong Nordhaus (see below)]
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/11/mit-study-rate-.html
26 May 2008 at 11:00 PM
I heard on NPR (I’ve searched for a link to the story but haven’t been able to find it) that part of the rise in the cost of commodities like food can be traced to the recent build up in wealth (sovereign wealth funds, pensions, etc.). So much wealth now exists that investors are having trouble searching for something to invest in. Apparently the value of these investible funds exceeds or is approaching the total value of the world’s infrastructure. My experience with economics is limited, but I recall that most efforts to place a dollar value on natural resources and biosphere services develop a number far short of the cost of the human-built world.
So, I guess at some point someone could give us a great deal on the planet earth. We’ll have to vacate the premises as soon as we mine enough lead for what, 6.5 billion bullets? But I’m sure the economists will be able to explain how killing ourselves today will pay off in the long run.
26 May 2008 at 11:59 PM
#3 Richard Pauli
Editors of the NY Review of Books seem to be up to speed on climate issues. Recent publications include an extended major statement by James Hansen.
27 May 2008 at 1:47 AM
Re #105:
The Nordhaus mentioned in the gristmill stories is Ted Nordhaus, a different person to William Nordhaus, whose book is being reviewed.
27 May 2008 at 3:30 AM
Re: #106 The May 9th broadcast of NPR’s This American Life with Ira Glass is the likely source: “The Giant Pool of Money” (see http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Archive.aspx#5 to download the podcast). Indeed, there is a problem of too much investment money chasing too few viable deals. The venture world is beginning to see valuations of fringe technology companies rising rapidly without recourse to investment reason (as money swings away from mortages to other investments). One case in point is a small (marginal technology) firm which we valued at $5M just attracted a $25M investment for 50% share in equity. The source of the investment was “very recent oil money” (at the time $75/barrel) who today has almost 100% more to invest than he thought he would at this time — for the same amount of oil shipped!) Ah! The toils and travails of the oil producer!
What does this mean in terms of CO2 and AGC? I don’t know — perhaps put economics to work in ways not previosuly considered. Maybe some genetic engineers might want to see if their fringe concept for genetically engineered trees might get funded (now as opposed to later) at a sufficiently large amount that it might be made to work sooner than later. Or, better yet, some investment in solar, wind, etc., technologies that compete with coal.
Keep up the great articles and the fiesty discourse.
27 May 2008 at 4:02 AM
Does freeman dyson actually take himself seriously..hope not! I’ve never heard such misinformed garbage in my life..well actually i have..and the garbage pile is getting deeper by the week unfortunately. Does he know just how many trees there are on earth..ok 40% less than 100years ago..but still shitloads..and does he understand the meaning of biodiversity..not for nothing we have 100s of thousands of species of trees and shrubs..they support more than 100s of thousands of animals and organisms. So that idiot thinks we are going to gentically alter each of these species..yeah right! Trees take too long to extract the CO2 from the air..we aint got the luxury of that time frame. I avearge tree extracts 1 tonne of CO2 from the air in it’s lifetime..1tonne..that’s the weight of the truck and branches and twigs minus existing leaves minus how many leaves it lost during it’s lifetime. We will need to plant billions of trees yesterday..well 20 years ago actually. Might be better to genetically engineer heat (warmer waters) restistant plankton that can sequester a much greater amount of CO2. At least that can be done on a shorter timeframe than trees. What do you guys think?
27 May 2008 at 4:03 AM
I just cannot help thinking that the Earth Science community has to be careful when confronting particle and atomic physicists who have a lot of quodos with the public through the big bang theory, space rockets, missions to mars, Cosmology, Astronomy - all of which appear to be big sciences with a lot of public admiration and awe.
This gives them a lot of leeway and clout when it comes to talking about anything scientific and especially anything political such as global warming. There are two videos on youtube interviewing freeman dyson where he discusses global warming and gives he reasons for not being a believer.
I am presuming he is retired now and hence someone from the earth sciences community ought to engage with this man and attempt a dialogue with him on this subject otherwise it could get a bit messy silly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTSxubKfTBU
He speaks of Alvin Wineburg and Oakridge regarding CO2 in the atmosphere 20 years ago and he was invited there to do some work in this area. It was the only place worrying about CO2 apparantly back then but he gave it up when it became fashionable. He is not impressed with the computer models and is more interested in real world data much like James Hansen. He seems to be basing his opinions on his own experiences rather than subsequent work done in the earth sciences. We do not know what is going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere untl we know what is currently happenning. In Brasil Co2 is being absorbed and in Canada it is coming out (from the earth or vegetation). I guess he thinks that this is important and the models do not cater for this !!!!????
Is Oakridge a big player in the computer modelling of earth systems ?
In the second video he speaks of the cooling stratosphere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k69HUuyI5Mk&feature=related
Global warming is a midleading phrase, stratospheric cooling is more important. We cannot measure average ground temperature. Rainfall is more important. Ozone disappears due to ice crystals forming and is more serious apparantly.
Computer models take all of the money, real world results are not given proper credence or finance and we do not known nearly enough. He cites land management as the key to regulating CO2 and not the stopping using coal or oil.
Any merit in any of what he says ?
27 May 2008 at 4:38 AM
re: 107 my phrase should read.. ‘1 average tree extracts 1 tonne of CO2 from the air in it’s lifetime..1tonne..that’s the weight of the truck, roots, branches and twigs plus existing leaves plus how many leaves it lost during it’s lifetime’ ..had a long day!
27 May 2008 at 5:38 AM
Bob Murphy writes:
Who says? Maybe mitigation and a switch to renewable resources will be the way they climb out of poverty. The assumption that fossil fuels are the only way to climb out of poverty is not convincing.
27 May 2008 at 5:55 AM
The Dept of Energy recently announced projects for burying CO2, at a bit less than $100M per Mton of CO2 (http://fossil.energy.gov/news/techlines/2008/08012-DOE_Funds_Large-Scale_Projects.html)
This works out to $600B to bury the annual US emissions or $2.7T to bury annual global emissions (of CO2). Of course we would not need to bury or spend that much. And no need to plant any frankentrees!
27 May 2008 at 7:20 AM
Econometric models… can any economist posting on this thread give a single - just a single - example of, say, a basic statistical analysis of the accuracy of econometric models. Take a look at the many, many discussions of climate modeling and data comparison here at realclimate, and use that as your template. This has not been done - because econometric models are nonsensical. They are nothing but a bad joke - and yet they are used as the basis for policy decisions by government leaders?
JonP above says this:
Let’s see - how would we apply this “discount” notion to simple physical systems? Goods and services are like matter and energy, let’s say. What is a “discount” in a physical system? It has no meaning. Basically (as the poster agrees), economics is not a science, any more than astrology is. Economists don’t even have to learn basic thermodynamics - it has far more to do with marketing and advertising than anything else, and has little if any scientific merit whatsoever. The field seems to have stopped progressing around the early 19th century (they’ve never accepted basic thermodynamics, after all).
Look at the leading “econometric indicator”, the GDP. What is the effect of destructive hurricanes on the GDP? There was a lot of damage and destruction of property, but also a lot of rebuilding - and if you tot it all up, I imagine you could “prove” that Katrina was actually good for the national economy -as long as you use this random indicator, the GDP, which has no relation to any real physical quantity whatsoever. Destruction of coastlines and rising sea levels will also make existing land more valuable - so, “logically”, we’ll all just get wealthier and wealthier as global warming progresses.
This kind of ludicrous statement seems to make perfect sense to economists, who justify it using the modern equivalent of astrological reasoning. Astrology is not completely unscientific, and neither is economics, but neither has ever shown much predictive value.
27 May 2008 at 8:04 AM
There has been a real shift in the economic community’s view of the Stern report. They may not love the methods, but they are accepting the conclusions.
As to Nordhaus W. delayers club, and his nephew Ted has taken up the cause.
While Eli has more faith in economic models than Gavin, his faith is in short term economic models. The long term ones are not even wrong, basically because of their extreme sensitivity to assumptions. A major difference between economic models and climate models is that the later are constrained by physical principles, the former not.
27 May 2008 at 8:13 AM
After posting a comment (still in moderation) I found raypierre’s excercise in graph cooking which is an excellent example of how if you ignore the physical restraints that limit climate models you get garbage. Economic models do not have such limitations on their assumptions.
27 May 2008 at 8:22 AM
An all party committee of MPs has just advised the UK Government to allocate a fixed annual carbon allowance for each citizen as a method of GHG mitigation that would be superior to carbon taxes. One would be permitted to use more than one’s allowance if one could purchase the unused allocation of someone else. Apart from the administrative joy for bureaucrats that such a scheme would engender, I wonder what answers the climatologists and economists who have so far commented on this thread could give me as to other questions which the all party proposal brought to my mind.
Should my allocation be fixed at the current annual individual usage rate or at a fraction of said rate? If I reproduce, should my child receive its own allowance (instantly or at what age?). If my neighbour breeds offspring at five times my rate, should each of his offspring receive allowances equal to those of mine? Should my Government allocate equal allowances to immigrants as to the indigenous population? If I volunteer for euthanasia, should I be able to transfer my allowance to an heir?
I ask these questions because various correspondents to this thread have touched on ethics. Until your website dissolved my AGW scepticism, I thought I already had enough to worry about. I had rather hoped that growth in global human population would stabilise (as it has in Europe) and then start to decline before we had exhausted all of our finite resources and doomed most wild species. This doesn’t now seem to be an option. The peaking or imminent peaking of oil and gas will vastly add to the costs of developing renewable energy sources. We seem to have very little time to fix the climate before global human carrying capacity drops precipitously. Meanwhile, population is on track to grow by 50% in about 40 years and the UN tells us that Africa is predicted to be capable of producing only enough food for 25% of its poulation by 2025.
I understand that about 50% of all R and D spending on non fossil fuel energy has been lavished on fusion energy which seems further away from practical implementation than ever. Without a quick and cheap way of doubling energy production (and, it seems to me, that fusion energy was the only hope), a discussion will be required on the best method of addressing population decline (not just stabilisation).
I would guess that the climatologists among you would be opposed to reverting to coal (without CCS) to compensate for static or falling oil and gas supplies and I suspect that use of CCS (and retrofitting) would make solar and wind energy preferable anyway in economic terms. We may, of course, use everything available to stave off mass starvation in the short term with scant regard to climate consequences. It appears that the green revolution, dependent largely upon fossil fuel and over abstraction of fresh water, enabled food production to more than double. This allowed extra population growth but appears to be leading to ever more hungry people and a degrading planet. Is it more ethical to repeat this exercise by rushing into dirty coal and tar sands for immediate energy needs than to allow mass deaths through starvation now to prevent worse in the future?
Are my choices too stark? Does anyone who believes in AGW and peak oil believe that we can prevent dangerous climate change while allowing population to reach 10 billion by 2050 even were it to decline to, say, 3 billion by 2200? If you do, please explain how and I’ll be very relieved but please leave me (or my surviving genes) with some wild animals to share the planet with.
27 May 2008 at 8:36 AM
Interesting discussion. I have run up against some quasi-similar issues in my day job doing risk assessment for radiation-induced failures in satellites. Basically, the problem becomes coming up with a monetary cost for failure when not all of the costs are monetary–indeed when some of them cannot be monetized.
The main problem is that in order to do a risk assessment at all, you must come up with at the very least an upper bound for possible loss. Since we cannot currently rule out that climate change could spell the end of human civilization (especially if CO2 sensitivity is more than the 3 degrees per doubling we expect). In my experience the way you have to treat such a risk is by taking immediate action to reduce its probability and/or consequences, while at the same time trying to better quantify the possible loss. In other words, such a risk always justifies immediate action even if only to buy time to find out that the potential loss was not as devasatating as the worst case analysis initially suggested.
Another problem as many have pointed out is discounting. It’s not all that mysterious. You assume that money that could have been profitably invested instead goes to mitigation. However, this presumes that the profit made exceeds the loss failing to mitigate the risk would incur. The situation wrt climate change is more like doing maintenance on a car or replacing a leaky roof on a house. Failure to mitigate the error early may result in catastrophic failure down the line.
27 May 2008 at 8:37 AM
“1. Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils.”
Souds remarkably like this story from New Hampshire Public Radio,
Square Trees Grow in New Hampshire Amy Quinton’s picture By Amy Quinton
on Tuesday, April 1, 2008.
The Society For the Protection of New Hampshire Forests unveiled a new development today that may revolutionize the timber industry.
Forest research scientists say they’ve created a new type of tree [square] that is ideal for harvesting and beneficial for the environment.
But as NHPR’s Amy Quinton reports, the new tree has already sparked a huge outcry from some businesses and environmental groups.
27 May 2008 at 8:38 AM
Greg (#99):
I don’t think that its not a matter of seeing trends and then looking to global warming to explain them. Rather it’s a recognition that i) humanity is ramping up the concentrations of CO2 and other gases, ii) atmospheric physics predicts that this will inevitably cause the atmosphere to heat up, and iii) scientists have therefore been prompted to investigate the oceans, atmosphere and biosphere to see if phenomenon are occurring that is consistent with the predictions, and which may reveal the likely impacts.
Yes Australia has a very variable climate. There have always been droughts and floods and there always will be. However the increasing CO2 levels and the consequent temperature rise are likely to make things more extreme and less comfortable for people and for nature.
You are trying to argue that our highly variable climate is an argument for skepticism and inaction. I’d argue that it means that we should be even more concerned than other nations, and therefore more eager to begin acting very quickly to address this issue.
The key plots you should note on the Bureau of Mets website are the temperature and density of high pressure systems plots. The temperature trend is clearly up and is therefore as the physics predict. Even if our rainfall remain within the historic range of variability, the rising temperature is increasing evaporation, and thereby reducing the amount of water running into our river systems. Yes damming and and water extraction are having a severe impact, but this is in addition to the reductions to inflow that the temperature rise is causing. The steady increase in frequency/density of highs is bad news as it is these that give us dry weather.
The South-eastern Climate Initiative is worth watching for a synthesis of what climate scientists are finding about our climate. The “Researchers are looking for patterns in oceanic and atmospheric conditions over and around Australia that will provide clues to present and future climate change, its impacts on water resources and lead to improvement in the quality of seasonal forecasts,”
Some of their findings so far are:
• There are firm signals in the current drought that correlate with future projections of reduced rainfall in southern Australia.
• There is clear evidence of a clear north-south rainfall divide on either side of a naturally occurring band of high pressure (known as the sub-tropical ridge) roughly on a line running east to west through Adelaide and Canberra.
• Mean sea level pressures have been found to have the strongest (inverse) correlations with rainfall across South Eastern Australia.
• As a result of the strong influence of increasing mean sea level pressures over southern Australia, there may be a weakening of the influences of tropical climate features such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole on the climate of south-east Australia
• Reductions in rainfall south of the sub-tropical ridge occur in late autumn to winter and in summer to autumn to the north. In the south, the rainfall decline started in the early 1990s but has become apparent only since 2000 in the north.
• The intensity of the subtropical ridge has been rising since the 1970s and that can be translated into a sizeable rainfall decline.
• The intensity of the subtropical ridge previously peaked in the 1940s at the time of a particularly dry decade in the south-east.
• During the 20th century, changes in the intensity of the subtropical ridge have largely corresponded with changes in global temperature. This correspondence means that there is a high likelihood that the current rainfall deficit is linked to current global warming, through the intensification of the subtropical ridge.
27 May 2008 at 8:52 AM
#115 (Ike Solem) and #116/#117 (Eli Rabett). Just as economists should exhibit a degree of caution in making judgements on climate science (unless they have studied it in great depth), so should climate scientists on economics (which of course encompasses much more than econometric modelling). Most economists would, I think, be extremely sceptical about the “skill” of econometric modelling for forecasting (or even projecting). But the statistical methodology adopted in seeking to test those models is generally pretty sophisticated (my impression is that it is more advanced than in climate science, but I could easily be wrong about this.) This is not an argument for an exlusive priesthood in either area - outsite commentary is potentially highly beneficial if well informed - which is why transparency in respect of methodology and a willingness to engage with non-experts is valuable.
Incidentally, the Scientific American “critique” of economics was feeble in my view - real straw man stuff. I think economists are usually pretty well aware of the limitations mposed by their assumptions - and try to relax them when they can. But I recognise that is simply an assertion.
27 May 2008 at 8:52 AM
Re #99, Greg
Unless you know something the Bureau of Meteorology do not know, then you are wrong. Check out the Rainfall Anomaly:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/timeseries.cgi?variable=rranom®ion=mdb&season=0112, plus the 2007 report:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs14.pdf
In the links that you provide, the 11 year running averages finish in 2001, missing the disastrous last 7 years. Do you realize that the Australian rice crop from the Murray irrigation area has been massively reduced?
You should also note that it is the first time that below average rainfall has occurred in the Murray-Darling during a La Nina event.
A recent paper on the issue that you raise can be bought at:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL033727.shtml
an overview of the same:
http://www.physorg.com/news130753439.html
Or are you better qualified or more carefully researched than Dr Wenju Cai to judge this issue?
27 May 2008 at 9:40 AM
Re #118, Douglas, the means exists to curtail climate change (AGW) but I am concerned that the economic and political will does not exist at the present time in the UK or elwewhere for that matter to implement what is required in order to do it. Do a search for desertec on google and you will find part of the means to achieve this solution. If our grid was renewable then we could start using electric cars such as the ones tesla and Nissan-Renault are going to start producing soon. It is all possible but we are being let down bu our governments and our economic system which wants to leave it to market forces.
27 May 2008 at 10:17 AM
==The Nordhaus mentioned in the gristmill stories is Ted Nordhaus, a different person to William Nordhaus, whose book is being reviewed.==
Arg, thanks for the clarification.
Thats about as confusing and Roger Pielke, and Roger Pielke.
27 May 2008 at 10:25 AM
I did not claim that any or all particular proposed carbon reduction programs such as cap and trade could not work. They are all clever and lovely models that are just as persuasive as any IPPC temperature graph. My point is that as a matter of political reality nothing like that will ever actually be implemented on a global scale. Ever. That is why I said that any solutions will have to be far more technological than political. If you don’t understand that political reality just say so and those of us who have actually worked in the environmental legislative arena can ignore you.
The political reality can be see in the current UN credit program which is a corrupt joke and a paradigm for government-directed emissions control programs–no reductions and massive cash transfers. Similarly, the US will eventually pass tough symbolic laws but will include ‘emergency exit ramps’, grandfather clauses and a thousand weaselly loopholes all of which will be well-used.
In sum, magical trees that eat all excess CO2 are a damn sight more realistic than the belief that international political mandates will actually be implemented, honored and enforced such that they actually impact CO2 levels.
[Response: It’s definitely a challenge - and there is clearly much to learn on how to make these things work efficiently. But mandates/cap-and-trade/pigovian taxes have worked in the past and so it isn’t a priori obvious that they can’t be made to work in the future. To class that kind of optimism with a completely un-thought out techo-utopian scheme is on a par with comparing the London congestion charge as a traffic calming measure with an ideal of personal jet packs. And without some kind of carbon pricing where is the incentive for the technology breakthroughs in any case? - gavin]
27 May 2008 at 10:30 AM
There’s no doubt that Dyson knows a lot about the Universe, but apparently he doesn’t know very much about Earth. For instance, in a public lecture not too long ago, he mentioned that all fossil fuels (not just natural gas) are formed by abiogenic processes. Now I can only speak for myself, but I’m having a hard time believing that “fossil” don’t precede “fuel” for nothing!
At any rate, using this argument that fossil fuels aren’t derived from lifeforms, Dyson goes on to argue that there’s little, if any, risk of this fuel source ever becoming scarce. For this reason, and this reason alone, I must take whatever Dyson says about Earth as it relates to science with a huge grain of salt.
27 May 2008 at 11:06 AM
Re 98 on CO2 cycling through the atmosphere, a short answer is given by John Houghton in “Global Warming-The Complete Briefing” Third Edition (p.39):”Suppose, for instance, that all emissions(of carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere from human activities were suddenly halted. No sudden change would occur in the atmospheric concentration, which would decline only slowly. We could not expect it to approach its pre-industrial value for several hundred years.”
This doesn’t take into account the “long tail” discussed in the Archer paper cited in comment #102, but seems to be a practical answer for general purposes.
27 May 2008 at 11:26 AM
Hi Doug and Pete, Although I am not quite as sanguine as Pete, I am not quite as pessimistic as Doug.
Doug, you very rightly point out that climate and poverty are related issues. As you and I both know from our travels, people living on the edge will try to survive however they can. If that means burning the last tree or lump of coal, so be it. If we solve our own CO2 emissions problems while ignoring development issues, our efforts will be undone as China, India, Brazil,… continue developing with whatever technologies are economical and available for them. Likewise, if we concentrate on development with a view toward resolving climate issues when the Global economy is on a stable and more or less equitable footing, environmental degradation will undo your economic progress and then some. Moreover, it is not just a matter of reducing human population. Decreasing population poses very serious economic challenges in itself, as we can see if we study areas that have suffered serious, prolonged population declines–e.g. Africa from ~1600-1900, Europe in the Dark and Middle Ages, etc.
Nor is it just a matter of replacing fossil fuel energy with renewable energy. Petroleum is a particularly versatile, transportable and useful energy resource. As yet, there is no substitute for it–and certainly no substitute that is carbon neutral. Even if there were such a substitute, the problem of developing a global infrastructure for its use is daunting in itself.
The economic infrastructure is also problematic. Markets tend to be very efficient mechanisms for resource allocation, but they tend to be brutally efficient, and they tend to only work over timescales that humans can visualize and with threats that are conprehensible. Unfortunately, nobody has come up with anything that works better. “Planned” economies suffer from the same shortcomings of markets–as well as tending to be susceptible to corruption or short-sightedness of the planners.
Douglas and I have discussed this previously. It really is a pity that there is no site devoted to climate mitigation that has the calibre and hospitable nature of RC. For those of us who understand the science and want to look at the challenges it poses, that is a real lack. Anyone have suggestions?
27 May 2008 at 12:20 PM
George Tobin, I’ve noticed a trend. Those whose day job tends more toward the political/economic sphere despair of a political/economic solution and look to a technical fix–either they hope the science is wrong or they posit some technological fix–e.g. carbonivorous trees. Meanwhile, those who understand the science and technology despair of a technical fix. We know the science is sufficiently correct that we won’t get out of the soup that way, and we know that technological fixes take time (and investment) and often have unintended adverse consequences. I suspect that we are both right–some sort of political/economic action will be necessary to buy time needed to make any technical fix work and to disseminate it rapidly enough to make a difference. Yes, like any political solution it will be plagued by corruption. Like any crash technological program, there will be waste and inefficiency. These undesirable and distasteful aspects need not preclude success, and when we consider the alternative… the price is not too high.
27 May 2008 at 12:29 PM
Re Barton’s comment in 113:
Maybe mitigation and a switch to renewable resources will be the way they climb out of poverty. The assumption that fossil fuels are the only way to climb out of poverty is not convincing.
This is indeed that path taken by the UN in its Millenium Development Goals. Sustainable development and environmental restoration are explicitly mandated:
UN Millenium Development Goals
27 May 2008 at 12:46 PM
Jim Galasyn, Hmm. Somehow given the track record the UN has of achieving its goals, I would not take much comfort if I were a dirt poor farmer in Africa.
27 May 2008 at 1:21 PM
Paleoscience folks can predict amazing things about an extinct species from a partial skeleton. Climate science folks can take 1.7 million or so data points and whittle them down to a hundred or so that will predict the weather 200 years from now. Miss Cleo can predict your love life by talking to you on the phone. If Freeman Dyson wants to predict carboniferous trees in the next ten years or so, what is the big deal?
27 May 2008 at 1:29 PM
There is a thoughtful consideration of future scenarios here
http://www.futurescenarios.org/
27 May 2008 at 1:41 PM
Niel Pelkey–In two of five cases (your contribution, included) those doing the analysis actually know what the heck they are talking about. Do not assume that because you don’t understand things that your ignorance is shared by all.
27 May 2008 at 2:07 PM
David Ahlport (105)— Collection, pyrolysis, transportation to and burial in a carbon landfill could be done in the United States (and Canada as well as Europe) for a net cost of about $100–135 per tonne of carbon. As much of the effort is in collection of the biomass, the cost would be significantly less if conducted in Africa or South America.
This is about the same price and much less risky than the carbon diosxide based CCS proposals.
27 May 2008 at 4:06 PM
#136 David B. Benson:
How much would collection and conversion to fuel cost? That would leave carbon in the ground that’s already there.
27 May 2008 at 5:01 PM
Martin Vermeer (137) — I’ve seen the ppt of a presentatiion for torrified wood, a different process which appears to produce no heating oils (as I recall). The claim was that otherwise waste wood could be collected, torrified and then sold to utilities to co-fire with coal (about 10% of the total in South Carolina). The claim was made this could successfuly compete with Appalachian coal at $80 per ton. The spot price for Appalachian coal is now upwards of $90 per ton.
The net price for biochar via pyrolysis ought to be about the same.
Following
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
keeps one informed. It is where I found the ppt on torrified wood (sometimes called “biocoal” in The Netherlands, which is confusing because hydrothermal carbonization actually exothermically produces coal within 24 hours, i.e., actual biocoal).
27 May 2008 at 6:09 PM
I want you to know, I sent an email to Prof. Dyson’s Princeton home-page, asking him why he puts more stock in economic models than in climate models, and why he ignores the fact that even moderate climate change seems very likely to accelerate the extinction of wildlife species in fragmented habitats. If I get a reply, I will report back…
27 May 2008 at 7:52 PM
I would not expect that you will hear back. Dyson has always prided himself on being a “visionary”. In his eyes he is just seeing the “big picture”. Technological optimism is an article of faith with him. I think I agree with him that technology is the only way to get us out of this mess. I’m just less optimistic that such technological advance will come with sufficient rapidity to allow a business as usual approach. Conservation and increased use of renewables are a way of purchasing time for the technology (both adaptive and mitigatory) to evolve.
Dyson is not a denialist. He accepts that climate change is occuring and that we are causing it. He simply fails to understand the risk calculus. That is not surprising for a theoretical physicist, but it does not take him outside the realm of science.
27 May 2008 at 10:56 PM
Ray Ladbury, I did not expect to hear back. But I already cannot be more annoyed. Dyson’s last several articles evince a blithe certitude about economics without acknowledging the problems at the foundations of the subject regarding the supposition of human preferences, the mysteries of economic growth, and the ignorance of space- and time-saving by non-market institutions when they are not monetized to show-up in the GDP. The results of course are the rather preposterous and self-fulfilling conclusions rampant in the newspapers that everybody is a free-rider, nobody works for the common good, creativity doesn’t exist, and the overriding determinant must be market calculation. Half the time, this is nonsense. On top of all that, the fact that any cost-benefit analysis of climate change vs. mitigation will not adequately record the destruction of God’s creation or Darwinian evolution (take your choice) because you are NOT allowed to put the dollar-figure “$500 quintillion” on your contingent valuation questionnaire under the question “what would you spend to save it all?” is mere icing on the Stupid Cake. Because if you take a different path with the economy, there may be no NET cost; indeed you might have even better economic growth. Economists can’t tell you one way or the other. They can’t predict creativity; nobody can. I am a technological optimist and I think we should institute a very broad range of fairly low-cost policies to reduce carbon use, explore sequestration, and seed alternative energies. And do it now! Dyson’s greatest failure is that he doesn’t say this. It is an intellectual abdication. The United States is going to spend $3 trillion on its current war; the Fed is accepting billions in flaky paper as collateral and has opened a short-term lending operation printing hundreds of billions of dollars more to bail-out the financial crooks who would otherwise sink the economy; the petro industry and the rest of corporate America receives hundreds of millions annually in tax breaks; the nuclear industry hopes you don’t notice that they could not exist in the free market without the billions of dollars in the indirect subsidy of being absolved from having to carry full liability insurance. Any economist who holds forth on climate change without owning up to this, without mentioning it all every time, ought be tarred and feathered. And I like economists!
28 May 2008 at 12:08 AM
Dear Ray Ladbury,
[edit - no they are not]
you should understand ever so clearly that that we do not really know what we are talking about. We patch a few holes in the fabric of our understanding every couple years. Climate is a high dimensional system with a shipload of noise and canoe of signal. The serious climate researchers all preface their results with this knowledge.
The Pielke-Schmidt letters may be collected and studied some day for both their scientific content as well as their social context. (Note that this is case for the Clements-Gleason debate)
Paleo folks argue vigorously in opposite directions about the same data.
Dyson made an unsupported conjecture–so what! Will Senator Imhoff use that to convince the ever-more-democratic congress to cut Goddard’s funding?
Why are you so peeved about it that you need to belittle others?
I look forward to your post on the calculations of the VaR for investments in CO2 reduction. Some very good financial engineering and risk metric people are physicists. I am sure you have the background.
28 May 2008 at 1:41 AM
Dyson is not a denialist. He accepts that climate change is occuring and that we are causing it. He simply fails to understand the risk calculus
Put more accurately, if you understand climate *and* risk calculus, and actually calculate things, you will come to much the same conclusions Dyson has with respect to the economics of mitigating climate change. Much of what he suggests in his article is consistent with most economic analyses of various options.
28 May 2008 at 3:30 AM
Re #129, daunting but not impossible, indeed as oil is a finite resource we must develop a new liquid energy infrastructure in order replace oil wether now or in 20 to 50 years time.
The same applies for Gas and Coal but in terms of electricity we can replace gas and coal fired power plants easilyl with nuclear, hydro, solar, pv, wind, wave etc. Storage might seem to be a problem but heat storage via CSP or compressed air and batteries is quite feasible now in fact CSP is perfect for that.
Hydrogen can be used to fly to and it can be produced by clean means. We can make a superconducting grid in part now (albeit at a large cost) and mayeb use supercritical hydrogen to keep it superconducting. We can even tap off the hydrogen in our homes for heating purposes and eventually for fueling our cars.
28 May 2008 at 5:54 AM
Ike –
Can’t agree with you about economics. There may be a lot of dispute in it, but it is an empirical science. Eocnomists may not know how to perfectly control an economy, but they know what will help and what will hurt. The theory of marginal utility in the determination of commodity pricing was a real scientific advance, and as a result a lot of things can be predicted which could not be predicted before.
I don’t want to see people who accept climate science become deniers of economic science. That would be as big a mistake as the reverse.
28 May 2008 at 5:56 AM
Douglas,
The all-party proposal seems like a horrible, repressive, bureaucratic nightmare. It sounds like it was thought up by AGW deniers to parody realistic proposals for carbon control. I hope to God it doesn’t pass, or the UK will go denier en masse.
28 May 2008 at 6:31 AM
Many thanks to those of you who responded to my queries in post #118. Pete (#124) provided a link towards the possibly most hopeful solution - solar generation/desalination from desert or high sunlight regions. I was already aware of the potential claimed for this approach and was impressed by the fact that no fundamentally new technologies would be required for implementation. Given current oil prices, it probably wouldn’t take much political effort to create a situation which would encourage the free market to invest in the suggested EU-MENA programme. In fact, I would be tempted to invest a chunk of my own meagre savings in the project if I were to 1) be assured by the more technical among you that I haven’t been seduced by an unrealistically over optimistic sales pitch and 2) that the transmission lines were reasonably secure against terrorist attack.
Theoretically, therefore, we may still be just in time be able to switch alternative energy scenarios before the atmospheric CO2 level rises sufficiently to create dangerous climate change. However, we may also need to consider active steps to reduce it through air capture. From what I have read and in the absence of expert knowledge of my own, carbon sequestration through biochar seems the most hopeful prospect, particularly if, when combined with ammonia, it can first be used to remove CO2, NOx and SO2 from flue gasses of coal plants and turned into a valuable agricultural fertiliser. In the short term, we may also have to consider a geo-engineering approach to increasing albedo.
I have dwelt so far on optimistic scenarios but, as Ray mentioned in #129, there may be insufficient time to reach global agreement over the necessary steps for action. 80% of global population resides in Asia and Africa which also have, with the exception of China and Japan, faster reproductive rates than elsewhere. It seems to me that, though we probably need carbon taxes to push the market towards production of renewables, these in themseves will be insufficient. Perhaps I could make a provocative suggestion to see what sort of response it might generate? Should we consider taxing births and longevity, currently subsidised by democratic governments? Frankly, I am terrified that a medium term soft landing with respect to peak oil and climate will merely result in more population growth and a bigger and inevitable crash later.
Ray suggests that managing a population decline isn’t easy and cites historical examples to back his proposition. I am surprised he didn’t mention China which is currently serving global interests (and its own) by effecting decline with some but not insurmountable difficulties. Obviously, against this global benefit, we must balance its growing exploitation of finite resources and the accompanying pollution. I accept that much of the latter arises as a result of manufacturing for the developed world but whether this is in other than the very short term interests of the population of the developed world is extremely debatable. It will clearly become necessary, therefore, to control international trade in such a way as to minimise, at least, atmospheric CO2 emissions. Have any such schemes been formulated? Would it not also be sensible to encourage population stabilisation with similar international trade agreements? How would adjustments be made so that countries (e.g. UK, USA) which grow their populations through immigration rather than increases in natural indigenous fertility are not penalised by such trade agreements? Obviously, it would be in all our interests to aid poorer countries with technological transfers aimed at reducing their CO2 emissions but it won’t help in the long run unless their populations stabilise immediately rather than in 50-100 years time.
CL (#124)refers me to a link which discusses future scenarios, the author of which clearly considers that no soft landing is remotely possible. Thus, in answer to my initial question as to whether the choices I posed in #124 were too stark and brutal, Pete and Ray have said maybe and CL, no. Meanwhile, the great majority of people in the world are going about their day to day business without considering the question at all, probably quite sensibly in the absence of political leadership - what else could they do? Even if people know that there is a significant threat in the future, they will put it out of their minds if there is nothing practical that they can do about it.
Finally, Ray (#129)stated that “it really is a pity that there is no site devoted to climate mitigation that has the calibre and hospitable nature of RC.” I know that it is a big ask but is there a possibility that the climate scientists that run RC could arrange for a regular monthly thread on this topic even if the lead article were to be written by an invited outsider? I note that “Air Capture” was an example, albeit an apparent one off. Could it be used as a precedent? After all, isn’t climate mitigation a component of climate science? It would be good to think that this science could move from diagnosis to treatment. If my doctor tells me that I have a condition that is likely to kill me but then refuses to discuss the possible responses that might lead to a more favourable or less dire outcome, he will be very likely to depress me and hasten my demise. I do accept that, given my age and earlier comments on taxing longevity, that I am, perhaps, being hypocritical with the chosen analogy.
28 May 2008 at 6:47 AM
If I understand Nordhaus correctly he discounts expenditures the same way that he would discount any other investment in the economy. Money spent on climate change mitigation is money that cannot be invested in economic production where it would have provided income that could have been invested in more production. With compound interest over a long period this leads to the future income forgone being many times the the initial expenditure. So far as this goes I think he is right. However there are some other things that have to be considered. First of all expenditure on climate change mitigation is likely to mostly come out of funds that would otherwise be spent on consumption rather than on investment. This means that expenditure on climate change mitigation will reduce wealth available to future generations from investments but the loss will only be a fraction of what he is suggesting.
And of course one can ask whether money is the appropriate measure for some of the costs. But for some of them it is and his discounting if scaled down appropriately seems to be a reasonable way of dealing with financial costs involved.
As for Dyson’s suggestions of genetic engineering of trees to sequester carbon I think other commenters have dealt with the difficulties of that one adequately. However there is a major way in which biotechnology can help us. We are not far from being able to economically produce biofuels from algae , especially if petroleum prices stay at he current level. This is a technology we can reasonably expect to provide much, perhaps all of our vehicle fuel needs in a few decades.
However the main problem is the use of coal to provide electric power. We have to develop alternative sources. There will be no one solution. In the long term I expect solar power to provide most of our electricity needs. But this technology is not economically viable yet. In the next few decades we need to expand the alternatives that are economically viable now or at least are viable with affordable subsidies now and are likely to have their costs reduce with further development. No single source will meet our requirements. The main ones that we can expand now are geothermal, wind and nuclear. In general the preferred one should be geothermal wherever it is practical. In many other areas wind can make a significant contribution. And widespread building of nuclear power plants will almost certainly be necessary. It is only part of the solution but probably an essential part. I don’t think we can count on the other power sources to supply enough power in all areas. If you reflexively reject nuclear power then I don’t think your environmental concerns can be taken very seriously.
All the alternative energy sources have environmental costs. We just have to minimize such costs. We cannot eliminate them. One of the obstacles is going to be the opposition of nimbys. People will and have been objecting to alternative energy sources being located near them. Local considerations must not be ignored but cannot be allowed to have overwhelming weight. We have do do ballancing acts.
28 May 2008 at 7:24 AM
RE #61.
The average rainfall over ALL of Australia has changed little in 100yrs. However the introductory page to the graph you show has the following text…
“Since the middle of the 20th century, Australian temperatures have, on average, risen by about 1°C with an increase in the frequency of heatwaves and a decrease in the numbers of frosts and cold days. Rainfall patterns have also changed - the northwest has seen an increase in rainfall over the last 50 years while much of eastern Australia and the far southwest have experienced a decline.”
Sure the land has been poorly managed, however pointing to average rainfall for the whole continent and ignoring the worst drought in at least 600yrs occuring slap bang in the middle of our breadbasket does not make any sense.
28 May 2008 at 7:27 AM
Neil Pelkey, like it or not, science works. It takes in evidence and information from multiple sources, synthesizes it and draws reliable conclusions. Your comments suggest that you do not understand how this is done, and so you distrust it. However, the fact that you do not understand the methodology does not invalidate it. The scientists who do work in climate and paleontology do understand what they are doing, and they understand it better with each passing year.
Dyson’s carboniverous trees are a demonstrably silly idea. Even if we could devote huge swaths of territory to sucking up carbon, such storage would be short-term. And such developments are a long way off if they are to come at all. I think that Dyson’s humanitarian streak may prevent him from having a realistic understanding of our current predicament. I attribute only the best of motives to Professor Dyson, but the best of motives are the enemy of progress when divorced from realistic appraisal or our problems.
As to VaR calculations, that ain’t my day job. Yes, I do risk analysis, and I do have the background, but such calculations at present would be premature. In terms of mitigation, it is still early days.
28 May 2008 at 7:57 AM
Don’t worry about Dyson’s silly trees.
I’m going to email him my goofy idea of using stem cells to grow mountains of gigantic sea shells. That way he can at least have a goofy idea from the right century.
28 May 2008 at 9:16 AM
Bob Clipperton (UK) Says
“other scientists who also assumed 60 years ago that Physicists like him would crack the nuclear fusion problem in a few years !”
They got the time constant wrong but not the rapid rate of progress. As far I can see Freemon Dyson’s little discussion about 4%/annum growth in real terms for a century is based on assuming Moore’s law (exponential growth) for everything! But the only example apart from megaflops per person, for which this is valid is nuclear fusion. A key parameter for success is the Lawson number which has been growing faster than Moore’s law (ref.below). So nuclear fusion and huge computer calculations are the only two examples I can invoke to justify the use of future discounting as simplified in the book review. (I have not read the serious arguments and may have misunderstood the book review ).
Incidentally I am completely naive about economics, but I do not understand why these simplifications about growth should apply for as long as a whole human generation? In addition there may be some hidden ideology involved.
Reference: Pitts et al,March 2006,Physics World,p.24.
28 May 2008 at 9:37 AM
>goofy idea
I put mine at ~/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001442a_familiar_pattern_i.html
It seemed the appropriate place.
28 May 2008 at 10:19 AM
Geoff Wexler, There is also Rosenfeld’s Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld%27s_Law
This states that energy needed to generate a given increase in GDP decreases by ~1% per year. This has held since ~1845, but it would be interesting to see if it also extended into the past, when animal power was dominant.
28 May 2008 at 11:21 AM
It seems to me that the assumption of a 4% discount rate is hiding a bad case of circular reasoning. The argument (in say #44) is that we can invest the money we save on climate mitigation now, and since it will grow at 4%, use it to buy a lot more mitigation in the future. But this 4% investment rate is an a priori assumption. Indeed, if we’re confident that our wealth will continue to grow exponentially–that we’ll all be 50x richer in 100 years, and 2500x richer in 200 years–then why should we worry about the climate?
But the whole point of the discussion is that we may _not_ be 2500x richer in 200 years: that due to the effects of climate change on agriculture, sea level, and biodiversity, we may in fact be less well off than we are today. In that case, your stock market investments are unlikely to grow over the long term, and a _negative_ discount rate would be more appropriate.
(I’ll skip over the effect of the chance of a giant asteroid strike on the discount rate; I think that’s too minimal to be more than a distraction.)
[Response: And moreover, the use of discounting in the traditional way assumes that the damages incurred by waiting can be fixed by spending the money made through investing. So, we are a lot richer now than when the last Moa was eaten. Can we use that wealth to bring back the Moa? –raypierre]
28 May 2008 at 12:28 PM
“This has held since ~1845, but it would be interesting to see if it also extended into the past, when animal power was dominant. …”
Animal power remained a significant contributor to US agricultural production until the WW2 era - 1945, not 1845.
This website has some interesting ways to learn about GDP, etc. It has a calculator that goes way back.
28 May 2008 at 12:36 PM
Ike Soloman at 115:
Good one! Thanks for saying well what needs to be said.
28 May 2008 at 12:54 PM
Further to #155 and raypierre’s inline response…
Part of the embedded problem with intergenerational discounting is the assumption of substitutability of manufactured & intellectual capital for natural capital. For instance, assume future aggregrate welfare were, on balance, enhanced by the development of new vaccines. Raw discounting of simple metrics like GDP implies that the increased welfare from the medical advances can be traded off against, say, degradations in the the ozone layer or marine fisheries, etc. Another way of looking at this is to look at the actual capital stocks themselves. Are human-made capital & natural capital primarily substitutes for one another, or complements? Do they matter individually or is it only the total, combined stock that is important? Think fleets of fishing trawlers versus fish populations.
Even acknowledging that there are examples of substitutability - e.g. chemical pesticides substituted for natural predators - one has to also account for how much that substitutability may change as you exhaust increasingly larger amounts of natural capital. We may be able to use humans to pollinate orchards at the margin, but couldn’t likely find a wholesale substitute for natural pollinators globally. So, even to the limited extent that substitutability may hold, it cannot be scaled endlessly.
If human-made capital and natural are more accurately complements rather than substitutes, and that the costs of natural capital degradations are potentially catastrophic and irreversible, it seems to me that the natural capital “costs and benefits” should probably be discounted at very low rates, and human-made capital at more traditional rates. I’m not sure how this would be modelled in a Nordhaus-type framework.
28 May 2008 at 1:17 PM
The comments here about discounting strike me as very naive and begging the key question of what we should do. DICE models aside, the basic issues are how much do we spend (or how much wealth do we forego) on mitigation, when do we spend it, and on what? We will address these questions whether we do it haphazardly as suggested here, or more analytically as suggested by Dyson and others. Dyson and most mainstream economists reasonably suggest that we should spend modestly on mitigating CO2 in favor of using those resources to mitigate current catastrophic conditions and saving them to use on more effective mitigation measures of the future.
So, we are a lot richer now than when the last Moa was eaten. Can we use that wealth to bring back the Moa?
No, we cannot, but what if we use those *extra* riches we would not have today to keep 10 species from extinction? Without looking at both sides of these equations we lose our ability for reasoned analyses.
[Response: You are assuming there would be enough left to save 500 years from now that you could make up for what goes extinct in the meantime. But, nonetheless, if somebody wants to do a variant of cost-benefit analysis where you ask — and quantify — whether you can save more biodiversity by deferring some spending to later, that would be a step in the right direction. Keeping different accounts for different kinds of harm would be a good thing. In contrast, the traditional cost-benefit analysis of Nordhaus aggregates everything into money, which puts you into the absurd position of allowing money made by easier Arctic oil drilling to be aggregated with some abstract cost attributed to polar bears going extinct in the wild. Note that even if theoretically more biodiversity could be saved by deferring expenditures, there still needs to be a mechanism in place to assure that those investment gains are actually expended on biodiversity preservation when the time comes. –raypierre]
[Response:
I’d be interested in hearing where people here would draw the line in spending to mitigate warming? The number *must* be between 0% and 100% of global GDP.
28 May 2008 at 1:40 PM
#159 Joseph Hunkins Says: I’d be interested in hearing where people here would draw the line in spending to mitigate warming? The number *must* be between 0% and 100% of global GDP.
Well, the Stern report - the one with outrageous costs and an hysterically low discount rate, allegedly - suggests the number would around 1% of global GDP.
28 May 2008 at 2:57 PM
New interagency government report on climate change effects on United States agriculture:
“Climate changes – temperature increases, increasing CO2 levels, and altered patterns of precipitation – are already affecting U.S. water resources, agriculture, land resources, and biodiversity (very likely).”
“Climate change has very likely increased the size and number of forest fires, insect outbreaks, and tree mortality in the interior West, the Southwest, and Alaska, and will continue to do so.”
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) “Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.3 (SAP 4.3): The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States.”
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-3/final-report/default.htm
Shorter (very incomplete) summary:
http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/releases/2008/05/080528101708.htm
28 May 2008 at 3:00 PM
Joseph Hunkins wrote: “I’d be interested in hearing where people here would draw the line in spending to mitigate warming? The number *must* be between 0% and 100% of global GDP.”
The nations of the world currently spend over one trillion dollars per year on the military, more than half of which spending is the USA alone.
According to a January 2008 report from the United Nations, as reported by the Associated Press, “Global warming could cost the world up to $20 trillion over two decades for cleaner energy sources … UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warns in a new report … In his 52-page report, Ban says that global investments of $15 trillion to $20 trillion over the next 20 to 25 years may be required ‘to place the world on a markedly different and sustainable energy trajectory.’”
So at least one estimate places the cost of mitigating anthropogenic global warming at no more than what the world is already spending on militarism and weapons.
I don’t mean to start an off-topic controversy about the wisdom or value of military spending vs. the wisdom or value of preserving a habitable planet, but only to suggest that the economic resources needed to mitigate global warming are available and comparable to those we already devote to other purposes that those in a position to allocate such resources deem to be important.
28 May 2008 at 3:11 PM
Re #159 Joseph Hunkins:
I think a strong case can be made for setting the mitigation spending equal to defense (war) spending. The US alone will spend roughly 700 billion dollars during 2008 on defense, all of it justified as necessary to protect the country from threats to its security. The threats from Climate Change are just as real and just as serious, if not more so, so why shouldn’t they they be addressed with the same level of spending?
At that level of spending it would take less than a year to grant every major city in the US a billion dollars for renewable energy power generation and infrastructure upgrades. With money left over for R&D. Can anyone seriously say that we wouldn’t see any reduction in our CO2 emissions within a decade if we put that level of support into mitigation?
28 May 2008 at 3:16 PM
One of the main issues with any economic projection is the past failure of all such efforts at economic prediction. However, that’s not the only problem with economics. Their basic descriptions of economic systems seem to leave out some very critical components.
First, for a sample of how economists attempt to project “economic variables” onto the structure of 19th century physical theory, (after comment #104) see this: http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d15a/d1520.pdf
If ecologists tried to do this, they would be loudly ridiculed. Ecology, as it is, suffers the reputation of being very “fuzzy” because things like animal behavior come into play, but ecological models of the very base of the food chain are on more solid ground - but they are nowhere near as advanced as the physical models of the oceanic and atmospheric circulation.
In reality, ecological models do depend on the physical circulation. The classic examples are the offshore upwelling regions driven by the surface winds, which bring nutrients up to the photic zone. This is why these regions are highly productive, both ecologically and economically. Collapse of upwelling would devastate both ecological food chains and fishermen’s incomes, and would lead to higher food prices for all. What we need to do is to convince all economists to take science lessons in ecology, and to get rid of their artificial variables (i.e. GDP) and their dependence on outdated pseudoscientific “rational choice theory”.
The fundamental fact is that all of our economic systems are entirely reliant on a basic level of ecological cohesion. If the crops all fail, everyone goes hungry - there is no magic wand that will automatically turn the consumer’s desire for food into food. There are ecological limitations to all economic systems, and that’s where we are at right now.
Speaking of upwelling, this recent data should not be to reassuring: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080522181511.htm
Just to illustrate the complexity of including ecology in physical models, here is a quote:
This is also yet another argument against dumping tankers full of iron into the oceans as a means of earning carbon trading credits - it won’t sequester CO2, but it will help acidify the oceans. This acidification and hypoxia of the oceans is proceeding apace, and predictions are that it will not be good for ecologies or economies.
This can’t all be blamed on global warming, however. Humans have also vastly increased the natural rate of nitrogen fixation, and much of the tonnage of nitrogen fertilizer applied to crops eventually makes its way into rivers and watersheds and the ocean, where it can fuel phytoplankton blooms. Ocean hypoxia is thus going to be a synergistic result of global warming and fertilizer dumping, with each playing different roles in different regions.
It gets even more complicated than this, because more recent research has shown that some algal overgrowth in rivers and lakes is due not to fertilizer inputs, but rather to the killing off of small invertebrate herbivores by toxic metals and pesticides, which the algae are highly resistant to.
One final note: oceanic hypoxia and anoxia are going to be increasing for the next 50 years, because the upwelling water coming up now was last in contact with the atmosphere around then, on average. Water in contact with the atmosphere today will be even more acidic.
28 May 2008 at 3:28 PM
If we’d been smart enough to protect the moa, we’d likely have been smart enough to protect the rest of the then biosphere as well.
No amount of money can come remotely close to replacing the biological services that were free (and thus ‘worthless’) a century ago in the oceans, or three centuries ago in North America, or a millenium ago in Europe, or four millenia ago in China, or six millenia ago in the Tigris-Euphrates ‘fertile crescent’.
What’s appalling is the waste of about 95% of what the world came equipped with, to turn five percent of it into money.
28 May 2008 at 3:45 PM
In #145, Barton Paul Levenson wrote:
“Can’t agree with you about economics. There may be a lot of dispute in it, but it is an empirical science. Eocnomists may not know how to perfectly control an economy, but they know what will help and what will hurt. The theory of marginal utility in the determination of commodity pricing was a real scientific advance, and as a result a lot of things can be predicted which could not be predicted before.
I don’t want to see people who accept climate science become deniers of economic science. That would be as big a mistake as the reverse.”
I tend to disagree. Modern economics is highly theoretical, rather than highly empirical. One of the best examples is the assumption that market volatility can be modelled using the normal distribution — a ‘thin-tailed’ distribution. This assumption, folded into portfolio management theories, won Markowitz and Sharpe Economics Nobel prizes. One can find in Benoit Mandelbrot’s book, Misbehavior of Markets, or in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s books, Fooled by Randomness and Black Swans, copious evidence that market volatility ought to be modelled using power law distributions — ‘heavy-tailed’ distributions with extreme market perturbations being much more frequent that predicted by a normal distribution model.
I don’t want us to accept theoretically-based recommendations from economists that we NOT take present action to prevent and mitigate future damage from climate change, without critically questioning the consonance of that theory with the real world — its empirical basis.
Downloading and studying Nordhaus’ DICE model and its documentation is a really useful and enlightening exercise. Its crudeness and simplicity are stunning.
Best regards.
28 May 2008 at 4:30 PM
Hank Roberts wrote: “What’s appalling is the waste of about 95% of what the world came equipped with, to turn five percent of it into money.”
And to concentrate ninety-five percent of that money in the hands of five percent of the population.
28 May 2008 at 4:33 PM
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Looks like the Arctic Sea Ice is proving interesting this year. Will it drop off a clif come mid june as it did last year I wonder. Maybe Prof Dyson should attempt to explain the accelerated warming of the Arctic sea ice without GHG and AGW theory?
28 May 2008 at 4:36 PM
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn14006-buckets-to-blame-for-wartime-temperature-blip.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news1_head_dn14006
human error and global warming. A paper published in nature to explain 1945’s temperature dip.
28 May 2008 at 5:30 PM
The most objectionable part is the idea that we are, in any sense, gloating about this. I’ve been concerned about global warming since before things like “Earth in the Balance,” e.g., came out. It worked its way up my list of environmental concerns precisely because it’s long term and easily obfuscated, and because the earlier you deal with things the better they turn out.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish that it wasn’t a consideration. For one thing, I have asthma and bronchitis. Where’s the incentive for me to acknowledge that cleaning up some of our choking pollution actually increased the climate problem?
I would much rather deal with other problems, shorter term, more personal, and more immediately rewarding. I also am not fond of how the response to climate change gets derailed into treating people as unserious if they don’t jump on the nuclear boondoggle wagon, for instance.
I think that’s a very telling accusation. It means the denialists and their followers are constantly at the level of equating the messenger with the facts, if the facts are unpleasant. It’s a real validation for the “Inconvenient Truth” title. Moreover, every thing still being said along these lines should be archived and brought out in the future.
By the way, we all know prevention is better than cures, that a stitch in time saves nine, that if you measure twice you cut once, etc. etc. It amazes me that denialists can even pretend to folk wisdom here.
It’s time that the gloves come off and the self-contradictory nature of their behavior is made clear. They claim that fixes are catastrophically expensive and also want to delay as long as possible even though that’s what makes fixes catastrophically expensive.
They want to kill the planet then get leniency because they’re orphans.
28 May 2008 at 5:37 PM
Few sights afford more innocent merriment than a catechist defending his text to the limit of his rhetorical ability . David Archer lets fly four points
1.”if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, ”
When did charcoal become thermodynamically less stable than diamond? If the guileless Dyson has left something out, it’s the risk of forest fires .
In 2. the problem is Archer’s own selective memory: ” Why is it that Dyson’s remarkably creative powers of vision (carbon-eating trees for example) fail to come up with alternatives to the crude and ugly process of burning coal to generate electricity?”
Er, David, you’re talking about perhaps the most eloquent and astute advocate of advanced nuclear power of his generation.
In 3., Anachronism bites back : “when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now…”
Just so. Given what science does for technology, and technology for economics, expect them to be thinner and richer , independent of what the environment does to evolution.
4. ” I often find myself contemptuous of efforts to misrepresent science to a lay audience.. I’ve got kids at home whose future I worry about.”
On that base note , the dueling tuba concert continues. Too bad the kids have to listen- if only their parents had read Dyson’s 1977 article :
CAN WE CONTROL THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE?
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2008/05/broken-arrows.html
28 May 2008 at 5:45 PM
I had missed seeing David Rutledge’s essay on peak oil and peak coal here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2697
entitled “The Coal Question and Climate Change”. It seems he did not consider tar sands and other unconventional sources of fossil fuel. Baring that, the analysis is of interest in that by his projections, there simiply are not enough useable reserves of fossil fuels to even get up to the lowest of the IPCC projections that he considered.
Provocative, at least.
28 May 2008 at 5:51 PM
Russell Seitz (171) — Plants utilize carbon, including carbon in the soil. So far, no diamond-eating organisms have evolved.
Seriously, AFAIK, only coal persists for millions of years. I know of no other carbonaceous soil horizon older than a few thousands of years, maybe ten thousand. I will admit that I haven’t searched the literature directly on this point, but see
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/node/578
for a review which includes this particular matter.
28 May 2008 at 6:24 PM
re #155 Robert Southworth
“a 4% discount rate is hiding a bad case of circular reasoning.”
Roughly speaking , the input of the argument is global warming denial and the output is inactivity; thats slightly different logic. The reason that this is non-trivial is that the people who are in charge of mitigation tend to be economists and I have been told that there is a tendency for more of their arguments (not just future accounting)to contain a sort of inbuilt global warming denial.
Although this is not about mitigation, there might be a related example of flood prevention in the UK , I get the impression that much of the government’s advice is based on past experience unmodified by climate projections. Is that unwise?
28 May 2008 at 6:52 PM
I’m sure David Benson is aware there are no charcoalor grahite munching carbonivores either- carbon sequestration , not diamond stockpiling is at issue.
The larger question the biogeochemicalcycle of carbon presents is the long term accumulation of C - as little as we know about carbon preservation in paleosols and peat , the sheer mass of coal that David Archer notes in his earlier response :
“There is about 5000 Gton C of coal, compared with about 500 (trees) + 1500 (soils) on land. Of oil and gas there are only a few hundred Gton each. Coal is the real issue.”
illustrates that a lot of it escapes both oxidation and soil organism metabolism only to end up suffering the un-ecological rigors of metamorphic geology. This gives rise to so large a variation in the hydrogen to carbon ratio of coal that it seems scandalous that the variable reality of coal composition is ignored by Greens when it could figure significantly in the debate about real-world CO2 policy.
28 May 2008 at 6:56 PM
pete best (169) — Thank you very much for providing this link.
28 May 2008 at 7:38 PM
Russell Seitz (175) — Read the report I linked. By some process, highly carbonaceous materials ,i.e., incorporating considerable charcoal, tend not to survive very long in soils. I’m perfectly prepared to suspect soil micro-organisms (and possibly even plants) metabolise the SOC (Soil Organic Carbon), this possibly taking up to thousands of years depending upon the particular soil.
I don’t know about graphite. That might possibly provide a long-term sequestration possibility, but one which does not appear to have been much researched.
I recommend you also read the article I linked in comment #172, since it pertains to the important question of coal.
28 May 2008 at 8:46 PM
Dear David :
Thanks for the link-I’m aware of the terra preta phenomenon The larger question is what limits the rate and extent of aerobic subsoil degradation of organic molecules in general. All those coals and lignites ( well ,maybe not shungite and the other algals ) were once kilo- instead of megayears old.
28 May 2008 at 8:48 PM
Alan (#149):
” the northwest has seen an increase in rainfall over the last 50 years while much of eastern Australia and the far southwest have experienced a decline.”
Strange that they focus on the last 50 years. Yes, eastern and southwest have experienced a decline, but a decline from an unusual high in the middle of the century. The early 20th century was drier than now. Everywhere in Australia. It’s there in the time-series.
“worst drought in at least 600yrs occuring slap bang in the middle of our breadbasket does not make any sense.”
Wrong. Hyperbolic nonsense. We have returned to the same levels of rainfall we saw from 1890-1950.
28 May 2008 at 8:52 PM
And in case any Australians are still being hoodwinked, someone has run the numbers for us here
28 May 2008 at 10:16 PM
SecularAnimist (162) says, “…I don’t mean to start an off-topic controversy about the wisdom or value of military spending vs. the wisdom or value of preserving a habitable planet…”
But of course you do with the obvious implication to stop military spending and put it into mitigation.
28 May 2008 at 10:18 PM
Dr. Seitz writes:
> If the guileless Dyson has left something out, it’s the risk of forest fires .
Entirely true, and that’s the killer fact in this proposal. Any severe forest fire burns everything organic in the soil layer and leaves gravel and soot above a waxy layer. It’s one of the classic reasons for needing small cool fires often.
If Dr. Dyson can get involved with the American Chestnut Foundation, bringing back those forest giants, he can do a good bit toward his proposal. He doesn’t need to wait for http://www.orionsarm.com/civ/Dyson_Trees.html
28 May 2008 at 10:25 PM
1) Economics and economists are really important, because many real arguments have moved from the climate science domain into the economics and policy domains. Anyone not already familiar with economics might want to go get educated, if only to be able to talk with the economists.
2) I still haven’t seen answers from economists for questions in #24 or #49. However, if you haven’t been reading up on economics already, I suggest reading some (biophysical) economists that actually make sense (to me, a non-economist, anyway):
Charles Hall, et al, The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics.
Robert Ayres & Benjamin Warr, Accounting for Growth: the Role of Physical Work.
and any of Vaclav Smil’s recent books.
and then compare with Solow Residual.
Hall&co, and Ayres+Warr have this minority opinion that economic growth has something to do with energy (or better, work = energy * efficiency), i.e., it’s a big chunk of the Solow Residual (or total factor productivity or whatever you call it. As part of my job, I used to worry about rapidly-changing exponential trends. If you have a straight-line on a semi-log graph (like Moore’s law), the temptation is to project the straight line, but if there is underlying physics that says otherwise, you’d better know it. Otherwise, some unpredicted inflection point leaps up and bites you, or puts you out of business.
If mainstream economics is right, and energy is relatively irrelevant to GDP growth, then we have this nice happy 2-3% CAGR growth indefinitely, and calculations of modest costs for mitigation may be right, and costs of large costs for adaption may be right, and the idea that the world will be 7X richer may be right. I.e., there is no inflection point in growth.
If the biophysical economists are right, and if the Peak Oil+Gas folks are right, then we’re entering a major inflection point, in which we have about 50 years to do a major rework of the world’s energy infrastructure.
- Over the next few decades, flattening and then shrinking oil+gas drag down world GDP growth well below the CAGRs used in all the climate-change studies. At some point, world GDP (and especially American GDP) might actually shrink, but in any case, 7X in 2100 seems *very* unlikely. In the Ayres reference in #24 are scenarios where GDP shrinks.
- Under those circumstances, the pressure to use a lot of coal will be enormous. The really bad outcome is that in a futile attempt to keep the economy going, we then burn a lot of coal, then it Peaks, and that leaves 2100 and 2200 to deal with climate problems, with a lot of stranded, totally useless assets, and insufficient energy/money to deal with the climate problems. In the SF Bay Area, people are already trying to come to grips with the expense of “adapting” to even a +1m sea level rise by 2100.
- on the other hand, if we stretch oil+gas as far as possible, and invest it in efficiency and renewable energy, while we have the money, maybe we use all the oil+gas, but can avoid (unsequestered) coal. Kharecha and Hansen discuss this in some detail. Personally, I suspect the US will eventually drill for oil (offshore, Alaska), and if that helps fend off coal, it’s a good trade, although I hope it doesn’t start for decades, since it’s like the kiddies’ piggy bank. (”Daddy, will you adults leave us any oil?” “Not much.”)
But really, one cannot dismiss all economists, and if people don’t learn enough about economics to engage them, you will not like the results, as a whole lot of policy discussion is based on economics arguments. As an exercise, if you live near a good university, go the bookstore, visit the Economics section, and look for books that incorporate, in a believable way:
- peak oil+gas, and energy in general
- climate change
- economics models
and please tell me. I went through that exercise last summer, and was not happy with the result.
29 May 2008 at 2:41 AM
Re 49 “DO people (especially the economists) believe that US (world) GDP growth over the next century is essentially unaffected by Peak Oil+Gas?”
On this matter, useful texts to consult are the two books by Angus Maddison (Phases of Capitalist Development and Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development), who I would regard as one of the world authorities on GDP measure.
The second of the two texts quoted gives a very clear description of the elements of GDP performance. It would be somewhat troublesome to explain why peak oil and peak gas would not fundamentally trigger a restructuring across both the ultimate and proximate elements of the performance functional as described by Maddison.
With regard to peak oil and gas, the matter requires convolution with that of SLR-induced destructuration of global production and supply configurations.
29 May 2008 at 4:53 AM
Hank, Thank you for the plug for the American Chesnut Foundation. My wife and I have been involved with a project to establish a grove of blight-resistant chesnuts in Maryland. So far, so good. They’re amazing trees–but way too slow growing to dig us out of the hole we’re in.
29 May 2008 at 5:07 AM
RodB and Secular Animist, Actually, the issue of military spending vs. mitigation is not completely off topic. As the environment worsens and population continues to increase, competition for resources may fuel conflict and therefore military spending (especially in developing nations that can afford it least). It is one more trap that we must negotiate
29 May 2008 at 7:32 AM
Re #171 Russell Seitz
Your criticism of David Archer’s point 1 is doubly misplaced. In fact you rather help to make his point which is a criticism of a pie-in-the-sky, sciency-fictiony approach to dealing with this issue when there are rather more established and well-founded approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
First, Dyson wasn’t talking about charcoal production. We can do that already and it may have some limited use (see below). Dyson is proposing something quite different - that we wait for genetic engineering approaches that will result in the sequestration of carbon in soils via genetically-modified trees. According to Dyson this is a certainty. However, if one considers present generation genetic modifications of plants, it’s obvious that we’re far from Dyson’s notion of genetically modified carbon sequestering trees. So far genetically-modified plants have a gene introduced heterologously into the genome in order to produce a protein that confers some property (resistance to a herbicide; secretion of an insecticide) or in the most advanced cases (e.g. golden rice) insertion of a 2 or three genes that will introduce or supplement production of a metabolite (e.g. vitamin A).
So what molecule of sequestered carbon are the GM trees going to produce from CO2? Trees already convert CO2 into a massive wealth of metabolites from sugars to proteins to fats and so on (even methane). But none of these is chemically or metabolically inert, and the biosphere has evolved such that every last molecule produced by plants is a fuel or a nutrient (CO2 returned to the atmosphere). Are trees going to be designed to produce pure carbon? That’s unlikely. There isn’t a known metabolic process, no known enzymes, no genes and so on. So it’s not going to happen.
The second problem relates to your question “When did charcoal become thermodynamically less stable than diamond?”
The answer is that it’s always been so. Charcoal is oxidized in soils both by physical and biological processes. There is a significant literature on this now, and it’s a real consideration with respect to long term carbon sequestration by soil dispersion of charcoal [e.g. ***]. Likewise as described in Science earlier this month, increased incorporation of charcoal in soil can result in loss of soil carbon (via oxidation to CO2) through the stimulation of soil microbial activity [*****].
The bottom line is that there aren’t easy solutions to the problems of atmospheric CO2 emissions, and pinning one’s hopes on comfortable magical science fiction solutions at the expense of existing technologies that can make significant inroads into the problem isn’t that helpful.
[***]e.g.
Cheng CH et al (2008) Natural oxidation of black carbon in soils: Changes in molecular form and surface charge along a climosequence Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 72, 1598-1610
Hockaday WC et al (2007) The transformation and mobility of charcoal in a fire-impacted watershed Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 71, 3432-3445.
Cheng CH (2006) Oxidation of black carbon by biotic and abiotic processes
Organic Geochemistry 37 1477-1488
Hamer U, et al (2004) Interactive priming of black carbon and glucose mineralisation
Organic Geochemistry 35, 823-830
etc.
[*****]
Wardle D. A. (2008) Fire-derived charcoal causes loss of forest humus Science 320, 629.
29 May 2008 at 7:34 AM
Rod B #181
For the part that went to the Iraq fiasco, the pay-off in terms of real security would have made that a great bargain. (But no, no wish to start an off-topic controversy
)
29 May 2008 at 8:49 AM
The US had a very respectable GDP before the age of oil.
From 1790 to the year the first oil well was “drilled” the US real GDP was 4.44%. From 1790 to the year the Standard Oil Trust was formed, the US real GDP was 4.47%.
In the 120-plus years of ExxonMobil’s bloodline, the US real GDP is 3.3%.
Perhaps “Giddyup” can better hold its own against “put the pedal to metal” than Yale economists realize.
29 May 2008 at 9:00 AM
Rod B wrote: “But of course you do with the obvious implication to stop military spending and put it into mitigation.”
Not at all. I intended no such implication. I only wanted to point out that estimates of the investment required to move humanity to a post-fossil fuel energy economy over a couple of decades, are comparable to what the world currently spends on the military, which suggests that the cost of mitigation is not an insurmountable obstacle. The world’s trillion-dollar-per-year military budget demonstrates that humanity is able to martial that level of resources towards ends that we consider important. If we can do so to defend against perceived military threats from our fellow humans, surely we can do so to defend against the threat of climate catastrophe.
29 May 2008 at 9:00 AM
Just to thank Bob Murphy for his clarity, plus an invite to you guys at RealClimate to write or host a specific blog about discounting and climate change mitigation. I am not sure how many people have the patience of reading all the comments all the time, so there are useful points buried in the long list above, that could and should be made available to all readers…
29 May 2008 at 9:29 AM
John Mashey, You bring up a very interesting point–really, except for a few academic studies of pre-industrial economies, all of our economic data come from an era of coal/petroleum. It may be very difficult and risky to extrapolate to an epoch where said resources are in short supply–or undesirable for reasons of climate effects. Indeed, this fear of flying blind may be one of the reasons for the reticence of many economists to accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change and its consequences.
The question, as we come to the end of the Industrial Revolution, is whether it is in fact the end, or whether it will be succeeded by a second industrial revolution based on renewables and free of the strictures imposed by the hydrocarbon supply chain infrastructure (and its concommitant political instability and concentration of wealth). The question for economists is whether any of them will be bold enough to envision how that will come about. One thing about Dyson–at least he is not afraid of being wrong. A good thing, too.
29 May 2008 at 9:55 AM
I am bemused by the constant repetition that reducing carbon emissions will hurt the economy. Consider these numbers from 2004, of GDP (in US$) per metric ton of CO2 emitted:
Switzerland 8902
Sweden 6591
France 5373
Denmark 4500
Ireland 4332
Italy 3842
UK 3670
Japan 3663
Germany 3393
Spain 3160
and the US 1936
Other mature industrial societies get nearly twice as much money as we do from our carbon emissions. This is not a technical issue. This is the result of long-standing policies to keep the price of energy low. Policies can change, and energy use will follow. Talking about economic damage is just more smoke.
29 May 2008 at 10:00 AM
Re #171 and:
the sheer mass of coal that David Archer notes in his earlier response:
“There is about 5000 Gton C of coal, compared with about 500 (trees) + 1500 (soils) on land. Of oil and gas there are only a few hundred Gton each. Coal is the real issue.”
illustrates that a lot of it escapes both oxidation and soil organism metabolism only to end up suffering the un-ecological rigors of metamorphic geology.
It’s more realistic to say that “a lot of it escaped….”. Because a very large chunk of the massive amount of coal was laid down during the Carboniferous under circumstances that were unique to that period. This seems to be a period when lignin was “invented” by trees and they used lots of it (bark to wood ratios of 8 to 1 or 20 to 1 cf typically 1 to 4 in modern trees), and there’s evidence that the fungi that degrade lignin didn’t evolve until a long period afterwards. Combined with the low sea levels and extensive low lying swamps the Carboniferous was a never-to-be-repeated opportunity for massive sequestration of carbon into the depths. [e.g. see the nice little article by Jennifer M Robinson: Geology 15, 607-610 (1990) “Lignin, land plants, and fungi: Biological evolution affecting Phanerozoic oxygen balance”]
I expect there’s rather more detailed information available on the nitty gritty of your question about the rate of sub-soil degradation of organic molecules. However we do know that the rate of sequestration of carbon in the soil [on the possible pathway towards “permanent” (if only!) sequestration as coal] is very slow. For example, peat takes around 10 years to “grow” one centimeter, and a one foot coal seam is the product of around 10,000 years of peat accumulation. Each year we burn an amount of coal equivalent to around 100,000 years of carbon sequestration.
Alternatively we can look at the paleoCO2 record and see that the atmospheric CO2 levels were not much higher than current levels right back to the end of the Ologocene 25 million years ago. So there hasn’t been a steady “pull down” on carbon through the soil (and into the underworld!) at an appreciable level throughout this vast period.
So if we are going to attempt CO2 pulldown and carbon sequestration in lieu of efforts to set some limits on fossil fuel burning, we need to come up with something extraordinarily efficient and bounteous. Let’s get those magic trees onto the drawing board!
29 May 2008 at 10:05 AM
Re #179 and #180, Greg,
The quote from the BOM regarding the recent drought in south eastern Australia is:
“The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to ten years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change”.
I am not aware of any credible analysis from Climate scientists that are in agreement with your assertion that the current rainfall has nothing to do with Global warming. I do not consider a cherry picking statistician (the someone) as a credible Climate scientist.
Your logical mistake is to assume that the rainfall patterns are just the result of random fluctuations. They are not just random, they are the result of particular forcings. Climate scientists understand these forcings, and as a result are in a better position to understand trends over a statistician.
Finally, if an observation doesn’t make sense it is because you are observing objective reality filtered through your own preconceptions.
29 May 2008 at 10:36 AM
Maurizio Morabito, Wow! We agree on something
It would be a useful service for someone to collate the main points. In addition to the discussion of discounting, I think John Mashey’s point about the effect of Peak Oil, etc. is quite important. How can we extrapolate future growth when we have zero data for a non-hydrocarbon based economy. JCH’s point notwithstanding, I think that you would find a strong correlation between US GDP growth and coal comsumption–especially in the North of the US. The level of industrialization in the North was a critical factor in the North’s victory in the Civil War- [edit]
29 May 2008 at 10:49 AM
Ray Ladbury Says: “except for a few academic studies of pre-industrial economies, all of our economic data come from an era of coal/petroleum.”
Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published c. 1776. Watt’s steam engine went into production in 1775. Intriguingly, the first use of the steam engine was to…? A. Power water pumping from… coal mines…
A curious confluence of events…
29 May 2008 at 10:54 AM
No need to genetically modify plants to remove/regulate atmospheric C02. The steadily increasing price of fossil fuel will take care of the problem - in northern Canada the cost to heat my home this year will be about double from last year (please contribute more to global warming - I need the ‘free’ heat), and I just payed $1.55 for a litre of gas ($5.86/gallon) which I understand is still pretty cheap in many parts of the world. With across the board fuel costs pretty much guaranteed to continue to rise, I do believe that the thermostat will be significantly turned down in my house this winter, and I certainly won’t be driving my Dodge Quad-cab 4X4 across the country on my summer vacation.
29 May 2008 at 11:06 AM
> chestnuts
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/05/27/chestnut/
Chestnuts and hazelnuts. This fellow, who I’ve known most of my life, has spent decades breeding varieties suitable for quick growth, coppice wood, hand-harvesting with long bearing season (plantings in China), machine-harvesting with a short simultaneous bearing time (US farms, where they can replace corn and soybeans economically)
The notion that we have to wait for some magical future science-fiction change to improve the world has probably allowed more delay than any economic or political foot-dragging or opposition to progress. Pie in the sky by and by.
Much of the needed work has already been done. It can be done everywhere. Why are we putting it off?
Dyson was writing in the 1970s about doing this — but as a far-fluffy-future hypothetical.
Phil Rutter began _doing_ it before Dyson wrote his silly puff piece about how it might someday be needed.
Get a grip on reality, it’s going somewhere. Why just stand and watch?
29 May 2008 at 11:18 AM
Whatever happened to the idea that it takes money to make money. Of course my Sunfrost refrigerator ( www.sunfrost.com ) COST some $2600, but it’s already SAVED that much money and a lot more since I purchased it in energy (uses one-tenth what other frigs use) and less food spoilage (an added bonus), and it goes on an on every year to save more and more (a much better investment than putting money in the bank or stock market). And there are plenty of examples of how mitigating global warming is an economic bonanza.
Economists need to read NATURAL CAPITALISM (see www.natcap.org) to get some idea of the great economic opportunities in “doing the right thing.” Emitting CO2 is what costs, not reducing C02 emissions. So someone ought to do some discount study on our terrific expenditure in emitting C02, NOT on reducing emissions!
29 May 2008 at 11:35 AM
Having read the Dyson article and all the comments here I’m somewhat surprised by the nature of the discussion. For me, what was most interesting was Dyson’s very concise summary of what the biosphere actually does to CO2 levels. The implications of that are, what I think Dyson was really getting at.
The fact that you can see 4ppm (ish) annual flux in CO2 levels as a function of biological activity is amazing really. Given our desire to chop down as many tress as possible the fact that we don’t seem to be affecting it is also pretty impressive (with the caveat that the measurements are not sensitive to see the loss of trees year on year). So what Dyson is really saying is that we already know that biology can affect the atmosphere pretty quickly and remove atmospheric CO2. I truly wonder at this point whether he made the tree comment to tease (or provoke)people because what he seems to be suggesting is not as impossible as it sounds. Let me explain.
Firstly, remember that there isn’t as much chlorophyll(by mass) or the other enzymes (dark reaction enzymes etc) as one might think. It’s no more than tonnes. Now that’s extraordinary in terms of chemical efficiency. Spectacular.
So the “fix” that Dyson is talking about isn’t making trees, it’s somehow harnessing photosynthesis. Once you make that intellectual leap then things start getting interesting because this is actually do-able. It’s pretty easy to conceive of either genetically altering photosynthesis cells to be even more productive as we already do in cell cultures or we can look at adding in genes to play with the pathway. And the important thing is that we don’t actually need that much material to have an effect if we can really understand the chemitry and biology behind the process (some of the reaction are pretty straightforward, some aren’t).
Another option might be to try to learn from the chemsitry and make a totally artifical photsynthesis catalyst, or a combination of the genetically enhanced and artifical. There’s been some work done at Brookhaven done on this already.So it’s not pie in the sky although it’s definitely non-trivial.
My own feeling is that it’s got to be worth continuing to work on this and it might, just might, actually work. No square mutant trees in sight!
So I rather think it’s disappointing that the comments made on this site have been so negative when it comes to a technological solution or mitigation. I’m amazed that Dyson’s “insight” on that front was interpretted in such a one-dimensional fashion. The data shows that biology plays a big role in annual CO2 levels on a global scale. I, for one, think we should try to harness that, irrespective of the economic arguments.
29 May 2008 at 11:50 AM
Ray, obviously the Industrial Revolution occurred in the United States/Colonies. The earliest reference I have found to commercial coal mining in the Colonies is 1748.
Still, the vast majority of Americans worked in agriculture, and that remained the case well into the 20th Century.
29 May 2008 at 12:30 PM
re: #23 — as eskimo-ese is a polysynthetic language, the number of inuit words for snow is actually unbounded. but if we ignored that fact and plotted out the NYT estimates for the numbers of eskimo words for each of the last 100 years anyway, we would see an exponential rise in inuit words for snow–not the decline we would expect if the world were actually warming. (unrelated query: ever wonder how many inuit words there are for “oh, ####, did you just see that polar bear fall through the melting north pole?!?”)
while we’re dodging the problems associated with finding a workable, democratic solution to AGW, we might as well use as many distorted facts as possible in constructing flawed analogies rooted in media myths and urban legends to argue for developing whole new languages to describe the economic implications of the risks identified by climate science. because that would be a productive thing to do while we wait for the genetic engineers to make super-trees that will solve all our problems.
i’ll go out on a limb and predict that someone, somewhere is genetically engineering a super-tree that grows its own hammock, so that the lazy people of the future won’t have to worry about finding places to sit. i’m also predicting that a deluxe model super-tree will sprout air conditioners that run on the knee-jerk reaction produced when CO2 is mentioned in the presence of denialism.
29 May 2008 at 12:56 PM
#189 JCH:
I suspect you used the calculator at www.measuringworth.com/growth .
While you show that real GDP annual growth has gone down from 4.44% to 3.3%, I see the per capita GDP annual growth has gone up from 1.37% to 1.93%.
29 May 2008 at 1:31 PM
Raypierre -
Agree that we may need more *refinements* to money values though I see no reason to dispute those of Nordhaus. Every human monetizes death, climate, and destruction indirectly all the time - people just deny this. Everybody knows that driving a car on a leisure trip (or far riskier, riding a bike!) presents increased death risk to their children compared to sitting at home, but at a benefit of the trip experience. Rather than the concept of values of life years it is the discount rate that is the key point of contention between various mitigation spending scenarios. I don’t follow Stern’s logic but if he’s right, Nordhaus is very wrong.
I’m fine with non-money categories for measuring climate problems and solutions but the point is to create some standard for apples to apples comparisons so you don’t have the absurd contention
that a thing has “infinite” value and therefore must be preserved at all costs regardless of how it impacts other things, many of which also have “infintite” value. The issue is not assigning value to things - it is *how much value* to each thing. Without this we allocate haphazardly rather than rationally, but we still allocate and value things. That is unavoidable.
Everybody:
Thank you for several thoughtful responses to the issue of allocating money to mitigation. I certainly agree that military spending probably has a much lower ROI (by any reasonable measures of R and I) than C02 mitigation. However I also agree with the-person-who- cannot-be-named at RC without pandemonium breaking out that we should seek the most effective (highest ROI) allocations of massive public resources and that that would push us to spend mostly on global infrastructure improvements rather than C02 mitigation or military.
29 May 2008 at 1:41 PM
Russell Seitz (178) — I agree and Chris (187, 194) has provided some information and references. Based on what Chris has written (but also the biochar review), I’m rather dubious about the prospects of long-term carbon storage in soils.
However, the problem may be viewed as so serious that even the prospects of carbon re-entering the active carbon cycle over thousands of years is viewed as less of a hazard than other schemes.
I should note that there appears to be little, if any, active research on hydrthermal carbonization, which will produce bio-anthracite after 24 hours of the exothermic reaction.
29 May 2008 at 2:11 PM
@Tim #193
An interesting comparison that demonstrates just how difficult it will be to get a global understanding for the problem. As a simple example, Switzerland may look like it made some right decisions in the past and therefore claim your list’s top spot. But it does so mainly because Switzerland has almost no CO2 producing industries. It is easy to show a good GDP/CO2 relation when all you do is banking. If you’d calculate the amounts of CO2 emitted in - say - Germany for the cars produced there and exported to Switzerland not for Germany but for Switzerland, you’d certainly get very different results and eventually different conclusions.
29 May 2008 at 2:11 PM
Russell Seitz:
This is very very far off base - almost completely so, in many ways. See comment #89 above, as well as comments by Chris, esp. #194.
It is nice to see that Dyson is not pushing the notion of iron fertilization as a means of carbon sequestration (even though it would be of similar effectiveness to the tree plan). While Dyson is a brilliant physicist, his projections about genetic engineering do bring to mind his earlier work on nuclear bomb-powered spacecraft… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
The notion that the biosphere can be somehow manipulated into sequestering all the excess carbon that humans have dumped into the atmosphere is highly implausible. First, is the biosphere in carbon balance, or is it already dumping mass into the atmospheric and oceanic pools? Do we even have a good handle on that? No - it is very difficult to figure it out.
How about the fossilized biosphere - the stored carbon in the northern permafrost regions? How about warming soils releasing more carbon to the atmosphere? How about new limits on photosynthesis brought about by environmental degradation, i.e. heat waves, floods, droughts?
There’s only one solution: stop burning fossil fuels, period. Even if we do that (and global fossil fuel use and carbon emissions continue to rise, as it has ever since the beginning of the 20th century), we are still in for projected warming over the next 50 years at least, and by that time most of the world’s mountain glaciers will be gone. Simply gone. Imagine that. That is almost inevitable now. Indeed, that is probably a very safe bet to make. Thus, it seems that we are not only going to have to stop burning fossil fuels, but we are also going to have to make some efforts at real long-term carbon burial - not at all an easy thing to do.
All across the western United States, for example, drought is really kicking in. This might be the worst fire season in history for this region - at least, it is up there - and this is not likely to change, as late season runoff dwindles and the soil and vegetation dry up.
The fact of the matter is that climate scientists have been predicting this situation ever since the late 1970s. There really wasn’t that much more scientific doubt then than there is now, and solar and wind technology was already poised to take off - and then came 30 years of fossil fuel interests intervening in government to maintain the status quo.
Apparently, the thought of trying to start the world’s biggest infrastructure manufacturing project in history is just too much for our government to contemplate. The situation is still farcical - look at the miniscule research budgets for solar and other renewables in this country. The country’s leading biofuel researchers are at small schools in agricultural states like Mississippi - because the state funds them - the federal government gives nothing more than lip service to renewable energy projects, and actually actively undermines them with a contradictory and fluctuating government policy toward fossil fuels and renewables - will this really change under any administration in the U.S.? We sure hope so, but there is vast ignorance on the issues among the press and the public. No matter how bad the press coverage of climate science has been, the coverage of renewable energy advances has been far worse - almost nonexistent, in fact.
Basic physical arguments and engineering demonstrations prove that we can meet all of our energy needs without resorting to fossil fuels or to any expansion of existing nuclear power capacity - simply by using sunlight and wind. The physical arguments are robust and undeniable - and the “economic arguments” that claim that “renewables cost to much” should be seen for what they are - marketing gimmicks for fossil fuel salespeople.
29 May 2008 at 4:01 PM
You don’t even need genetic engineering…
29 May 2008 at 4:08 PM
This discussion about global warming and economics exemplifies the massive paradigm shift that humanity needs in order to survive. We are having an existential crisis because our worldview and our ways of being have taken us this far but cannot take us any farther. We can argue about discount rates and about how much CO2 we can “afford” to reduce and about technology etc., but I think these concepts are still within the framing story that is now experiencing the limits of its usefulness.
This reminds me of the famous Einstein quote that the solution of a problem requires a different level of thinking than that which created the problem. The different level of thinking now required can be summed up nicely, I think, in one word: sustainability. It seems to me that most of what humanity has done so far in its history has been able to ignore sustainability because limits were far off. Now we are there, and we need a new philosophy of life that will carry us into humanity’s next era, that is, a full world and one with very visible limits.
One poster mentioned Herman Daly. I have read two of his books, “For the Common Good” and “Beyond Growth”, and I highly recommend them to you. Daly is a truly innovative thinker, and I believe his vision for economics is what humanity needs to make this transition into its new era of existence.
Global warming is but one manifestation of humanity’s current worldview; dealing with global warming will require a new worldview, a more holistic one in which we evaluate all we do through the lens of sustainability.
29 May 2008 at 5:01 PM
Ike Solem wrote: “The fact of the matter is that climate scientists have been predicting this situation ever since the late 1970s. There really wasn’t that much more scientific doubt then than there is now, and solar and wind technology was already poised to take off - and then came 30 years of fossil fuel interests intervening in government to maintain the status quo.”
Actually it is worse than that. The Paley Commission recommended to President Truman in 1952 that the USA aggressively fund the development of solar energy and projected that there could be millions of solar-powered homes within a generation. The Eisenhower administration rejected that recommendation, cut funding for solar research, and chose instead to invest billions in “the peaceful atom”.
29 May 2008 at 5:13 PM
Joseph Hunkins, I really don’t mean to be confrontational, but how would you, personally, value–monetarily or otherwise–the destruction of human civilization? Based on the possible warming scenarios, this threat cannot be ruled out. I understand the need for a common basis when comparing risks or planning risk mitigation, but some risks defy such approaches. If you can’t bound the risk, you have to act energetically to better define the probability of the threat being realized AND start acting immediately to mitigate the consequences of the threat. I would contend that is the situation where we currently find ourselves wrt climate change.
29 May 2008 at 5:38 PM
#201–Keith, I agree that Dyson certainly isn’t to be demonized. He acknowledges the reality of anthropogenic climate change after all. Still, his airy, dismissive technological optimism in the face of such an unprecedented threat borders on the irresponsible. As yet, all we’ve managed to do is demonstrate that the threat is serious and potentially quite severe. We haven’t bounded the risk. We don’t have workable solutions–and worst of all, demographic, economic and political trends are working against our developing effective mitigation and/or adaptation strategies. And along comes Dyson, saying that technology will solve all without so much as a hiccup to future economic growth. The thing we have to remember is that Dyson, while a technophile, is a theoretical physicist, and speaking as a physicist (though an applied one), we aren’t always the most practical folks. The whole thing sort of reminds me of the joke about the engineer, physicist and mathematician sharing a room in a hotel at a conference. They are all asleep when a fire starts in a waste basket. The engineer smells the smoke, wakes up and grabs the fire extinguisher and sprays wildly toward the flames, spraying until he’s sure it’s out. He’s made a big mess, but falls back asleep in his wet bedclothes knowing he’s safe–or so he thinks. But the fire breaks out again. This time the physicist wakes up, runs over to the desk, writes down some equations, then runs over to the fire extinguisher, gives 3 short squirts at the base of the fire and extinguishes it. Back to bed he goes, but the fire breaks out again. This time it’s the mathematician who wakes up. Alarmed, he see the fire. Then he sees the fire extinguisher. “Oh, a solution exists,” and goes back to sleep. You can guess who Dyson reminds me of–except we don’t yet have a fire extinguisher.
29 May 2008 at 5:53 PM
re: #201 Keith
I personally think that bio-engineering will be important. I know Stanford’s President thinks so too, which is why things like Bio-X exist.
BUT: talking about magic things that will save us 30 years from now doesn’t impress me very much as an action plan, and reminds me of the old saw:
“In theory, theory and practice and the same, but in practice, they aren’t.”
Serious R&D portfolio managers run *progressive commitment*:
Basic Research [fund lots of little projects, some with 20-30-year horizons]
[these days, mostly in universities]
Applied Research [pick some of the more promising and take further]
Exploratory Development [build more things]
Advanced Development [some combine this with the previous] [push tech]
Development [uses technology that works]
Deployment & Scaleup [$$$$$]
Of the 35 years or so I’ve spent doing, managing, funding such things, 10 were spent at Bell Labs, arguably the premier industrial research lab *ever*, part of a company that actually though about 40-year timeframes, not just next quarter, and which generated many real breakthroughs. BUT, our mantra was:
NEVER SCHEDULE BREAKTHROUGHS
When you have to deploy on a vast scale (and the Bell System of old was pretty vast as companies went), you deploy technology you already have. In 1930, nobody said “Don’t worry, in 1947 someone will invent transistors”, but of course physics research was already going on. At Bell Labs, Basic R (and some Applied R) was ~7% … and it was worth every penny, but it didn’t produce specified results to schedule.
It took years before transistors were really exploited. Solar cells were a tiny niche for a long time. No one had the slightest idea that lasers would be a giant business. UNIX was a “toy” used by a handful of us for years before it caught on, and later surprised Bell executives when they discovered that almost every software project had some dependency on it. One of my jobs was to keep an eye on Research to grab anything we could make use of, but it was never predictable. A friend of mine got a Nobel prize, and he says:
“Most people get Nobels for things they were looking for, we got ours for finding something we were trying to get rid of!”
People get crazy about lab-scale results, but useful things have to surive massive scaleup. Another old saw is the “MIT grad student syndrome::
Q: What can you build with 5 MIT PhD students?
A: Anything!… but you can only build one of it.
Anyway, we likely will get bio-engineered help, but the terrible danger in this kind of thing is that people wait around for wonderful solutions sometime later, rather than investing in and managing a disciplined, multi-decadal R&D program.
If someone is talking about breakthroughs, ask them:
a) What’s your past involvement with long-term R&D & deployment?
b) What’s your proposed R&D program that might lead there?
29 May 2008 at 8:07 PM
Ray, I quite agree with your analysis, which always seems to be the case. Your comment that “we don’t yet have a fire extinguisher” called to mind the frustration I sense in Jim Hansen’s missive of today.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080529_DearGovernorGreenwash.pdf
29 May 2008 at 8:52 PM
re: #193 Tim
In support of what you say (policy), see the (awesome) Art Rosenfeld’s Articles page for great presentations. But especially, see page 7 of Rosenfeld talk in 2007, although the numbers are for a different year, and I think the slide slightly misnomered (should be:
“intensity (tons of CO2 per 2000 $1000). I.e., divide $1000 by the energy intensity to get somewhat similar numbers to those in your list.
Every state is different, but if the US as a whole could even move half the way towards what California already does, a lot of things would be better, and msot of this is by *policy* applied over decades. As faras I can tell, this hasn’t made Californians horribly poor…
With most of its power from a hydro, a long-established train system, and small size, Switzerland will be hard to catch.
29 May 2008 at 8:55 PM
John Mashey (214) off topic but, since corporations are often lambasted, I’ll second your kudos of Bell Labs (I had ~15 years with (the original) AT&T) and AT&T’s stewardship. All that basic R&D money was spent knowing that they could not have exclusive patent rights to anything they discovered.
29 May 2008 at 10:44 PM
re 187 et seq.
Chris, Thanks for the heads upon Cheng and Hockaday- I will read them with interest.
But Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta is not where one expects to see an examination of the limits of polymer formation in plants or the state of synthetic biology. We might ask Dyson, but I doubt if such products of natural selection as biodegradable polysaccarides are what has in mind. With rubber and polyethylene around, he has no need of diamonds as a paradigm- the plenum of durable polymers whose long degradation times ecologists complain of shows where his taste in plant biotech is pointing-
I don’t pretend to know how the hierarchy of compatibility with photosynthetic pathways in simple and complex plants will evolve as syn bio grows in sophistication( and photosynthetic bandwidth)
30 May 2008 at 3:05 AM
Ray and John,
Thanks for the response. I agree with you both. I too work in an applied science field so I have a very strong bent towards practical science as opposed to paper science. I work in a field where for every 250K compounds or so that we make only one ends up being a drug. Even those odds don’t stop us continuing to keep trying which why I’m still in the lab. So I absolutely agree with your comments. I was not suggesting for a moment that we focus soley on technological solution at the expense of everything else. My point was that Dyson’s theoretical solution isn’t quite as wacky as some have suggested and the data demonstrates the potential for a biological solution/mitigation; it’s a real life proof of concept if you like. I think that annual 4ppm shift is facinating given that our inductrial output of CO2 isn’t reducing.
[There is one interesting point here; more of a comment or question perhaps. It’s the issue of timescales. On a annual basis there is a regular flux of CO2 levels affected by biology. That contrasts quite sharply with geological time or even the timescale of the last 100 years. It’s very reminicent of kinetics and thermodynamics (if I were to look at my own field). Sometimes, we don’t end up at the theromdynamic sink. Very often the rate of reaction, rather than the most favourable thermodynamic outcome, dominates. In fact, a vast number of biological reactions are tuned to drive reactions down this apparently unfavourable pathway simply because the kinetic are much much faster. And so I’ve always wondered about that analogy from a climate change point of view. Is the rate of change of temperature more important than the absolute amount and so can a process which acts quickly have a much bigger impact than one that gets you a bigger effect. Just a thought.]
Anyway, back to Dyson. It’s perfectly feasible even given our rudimentary knowledge that a technological solution can be derived and put into action. So I merely believe that it should be done in addition to whatever other solutions people can derive. You never know, one of them might work!
30 May 2008 at 3:18 AM
John, Rod, how could I disagree, being a Unix lover… writing this on my Linux workstation
30 May 2008 at 3:28 AM
Ray L asked: how would you, personally, value–monetarily or otherwise–the destruction of human civilization?
Ray I’m going to give this some thought because it’s provocative but it’s not relevant to this discussion. Surely you don’t believe that the entire civilization is going to crumble from climate change? Even the most catastrophic scenarios would not kill everybody, and there is *very little reason* to believe things will pan out very much differently than the range of IPCC projections for sea level rise and temperature increases - ie we’ll be negatively affected by climate change but not catastrophically.
You can assign value to a life or a life year - this is done all the time with respect to transportation planning and funding and environmental pollution analyses. Unfortunately these numbers are not very consistent or standardized but the EPA’s mean life value number (based on an analysis of 26 studies) was 4.8 million. I’d guess this is actually much higher than the life values you would infer from most people’s risky behaviors. For example bicycling on busy streets, driving in storms or drunk, smoking and all other risks.
Therefore the relevant economic questions are *exactly* the types of questions Nordhaus is asking, and I believe answering very adequately and in tune with what several climate focused economists have been suggesting for the past few years - modest to low spending on mitigation until the technologies improve and the specific threats to humanity are much clearer.
Why are you dodging the questions we *must* answer - how much, on what, and when? I know you are NOT saying that civilization has infinite value and civilization might be destroyed by climate change therefore we must spend 100% of GDP on climate, so what are you suggesting we do spend? Shrewdly or with ignorance of the factors, it is a decision that *must* be made.
30 May 2008 at 4:46 AM
Re #162, if it could cost up to $20 trillion to mitigate climate change then I can now see why the G8 have being very cautious regarding low carbon technologies in their statement this week and are still in my opinion going to side with the CSLF:IEA idea of carbon capture ready coal fired power plants to allow the plants to be built now and retrofitted later to allow for coal to liquids and electricity projects to go ahead. I guess there thinking is that if we can keep on track energy wise then we can await that scientific breakthrough to provide cheap low carbon energy some time in the future.
Only one big issues remains, the longer we leave it the longer the current infrastructure has to run due to the sheer length of time it takes to design, develop, scale and rollout any new technology on a large enough scale to replace fossil fuel infrastructures.
Kind of scary really but I reckon the G8 will commit to coal come this July’s meeting.
30 May 2008 at 6:24 AM
I believe that it has been said in this thread already about Gt carbon equivilent left in oil, gas and coal. oil totals 200 Gt conventional and another 500+ is oil/tar/shale sands, 200 in gas and 5000 Gt in Coal. If coal to liquid become serious popular as oil becomes scarcer then expect those coal reserves to start to fall quicker. I just wonder if even king coal can step up to the mark and subsidise oil CCS ready or not.
30 May 2008 at 6:26 AM
As a soil scientist and environmental consultant the thought of “genetically engineered” enhanced carbon eating trees, especially if the cell walls are weakened as well (gives a new meaning to Rubber Trees!) is a matter of some concern.
Instead of shipping food as aid we should consider shipping organic matter in the form of compost out of the densely populated so called advance societies and into the poorer areas of the world who seem to have the worst soils -high sand fraction - low unreliable rainfall and, in relation to the capacity of the resource to provide food, too high a population. Regular applications of humus will improve moisture holding capacity and provide nutrients (minimizing also the use of industrial granular fertilizers) particularly for the key small vegetable and perennial tree plots that are critical for minimal human nutrition levels. The carbon equation needs calculating on this but I think it comes out just positive if the shipping is carbon neutral. Perennial food crops are also encouraged - carbon eating trees again - which should, albeit it slowly, improve the rainfall factor. Real improvement doesn’t come from magic bullets it comes from sound science.
30 May 2008 at 7:49 AM
Joseph Hunkins asserts: “Surely you don’t believe that the entire civilization is going to crumble from climate change?” My “belief” is motivated by what the science says, and right now, the science cannot preclude the possibility of more than 6 degree per doubling of CO2. In fact, the probability of more tha 6 degrees is much more than that of 1.5 degrees or less. See:
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf
Since the costs of climate change increse nonlinearly (probably exponentially) with increasing CO2 sensitivity, we have a condition where the estimated risks of climate change are driven by the high-end tail of the probability distribution for sensitivity. Indeed, given that current models do not take into account feedback from CO2 and methane outgassing from permafrost, clathrates, etc., the situation could actually be worse. If we reach a tipping point and such outgassing starts to swamp anthropogenic emissions, we’re in the soup–literally. Some of the most severe mass extinctions have occurred due to greenhouse gas emissions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
http://www.livescience.com/health/080528-methane-escape.html
Finally, keep in mind that human civilization depends on a very complicated infrastructure, and that this infrastructure becomes more and more complicated now that we have to support 6.6 billion people. How fragile will it be when we must support 9 billion or 12 billion?
These are risks that are still unbounded, so I would argue that the situation demands immediate action to buy time–both to better understand the risks we face and to develop strategies for mitigating them.
30 May 2008 at 7:58 AM
#224
Timothy I know you mean well but do you really think the answer is to ship our rotten waste to the poor?
heaven help us
30 May 2008 at 9:07 AM
#225
“given that current models do not take into account feedback from CO2 and methane outgassing from permafrost, clathrates, etc”
hi Ray why do current climate models not take into account all of this stuff? Is this a big failing in climate models? Are there any other failings or is it just this?
30 May 2008 at 9:09 AM
Alen K (226),
What you call “rotten waste” some others call “black gold”. Let’s cut the hyperbole, shall we? Humus is an important constituent of fertile soil and serves many functions as mentioned by Timothy. Not the least of which is to sequester carbon as soil organic matter. Some forms of humeric acids take thousands of years to break down.
30 May 2008 at 9:10 AM
Joseph Hunkins, in addition to the articles provided by Ray in 225, you might also have a look at
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=impact-from-the-deep
The article suggests that the mass extinction at the end Permian, 251 million years ago, was caused by massive release of hydrogen sulfide from the oceans. The hydrogen sulfide was produced by anaerobic bacteria as the oceans became anoxic due to global warming. CO2 levels at the time were around 1000ppm. The H2S not only poisoned most life on land and in the sea, but also destroyed the ozone layer, leaving ultraviolet radiation to handle the mop up. The writer also suggests that this process may have figured in other great extinctions.
The potential risks we are dealing with are indeed very serious. Maybe Ward is wrong. But if there is even a ten percent chance he is right, how high should we be willing to see CO2 levels go? But, in any case, sea level rise, crop failures, etc., will produce their own catastrophic effects and are not just probable, but inevitable, if we stay on the current course.
30 May 2008 at 9:23 AM
If it’s “rotten waste” then why do people buy it from those who sell it?
He’s talking about shipping it as a form of aid, because it helps improve soil (he’s a soil scientist).
30 May 2008 at 9:34 AM
#228 has anyone asked the poor people whether they think it’s such a great idea to receive our rotten waste?
Rich people pronouncing what’s good for the poor - nothing’s going to get solved that way.
30 May 2008 at 9:41 AM
“Every human monetizes death, climate, and destruction indirectly all the time - people just deny this. Everybody knows that driving a car on a leisure trip (or far riskier, riding a bike!) presents increased death risk to their children compared to sitting at home, but at a benefit of the trip experience. Rather than the concept of values of life years it is the discount rate that is the key point of contention between various mitigation spending scenarios.” - Joseph Hunkins@205.
Typical neoclassical economists’ tosh. There is absolutely zero evidence that we have any internal calculator that “monetises” all the potential benefits and risks of particular courses of action; or even that we consider or try to consider all such risks and benefits. Rather, when we are not acting from habit or imitation, we act to achieve or preserve particular goals, and which goals we choose to pursue is determined by the interaction of external circumstances, innate drives, and long-term plans.
30 May 2008 at 10:08 AM
Alan K,
The climate models don’t consider such outgassing feedbacks because they are poorly constrained. They also aren’t terribly important for the climate of the last century, so there would be no way to know if one had the proper level. We know they are there–after all, the skeptics are telling us (incorrectly) that temperature always leads CO2.
This is a risk we’re still trying to understand, but it is daunting.
30 May 2008 at 10:09 AM
Re: #218: Russell, if you were discussing an examination of the limits of polymer formation in plants or the state of synthetic biology in your post (#171) on David Archers article, then we might not have gone to Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta. However you were making an assertion about the thermodynamic stability of charcoal; and that leads us to Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta amongst other fine sources
But, O.K., let’s discuss “the limits of polymer formation in plants or the state of synthetic biology”. You’re saying now that it’s not charcoal, but rubber and polyethylene that are the “paradigm”s of choice. Good. However rubber is perfectly biodegradable….polyethylene is made by industrial reactions using oil. So you need to tell us how you’re going to get trees to make non-biodegradable rubber (after all, we could just tap their rubber, vulcanize it, turn it into tyres and pile these up in farmyards like they do in the UK), or get trees to make polyethylene, and to sequester these in soil or bury them underground.
These are not trivial questions. After all Dyson has asserted:
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp.
Now either we know how to do that, or are sure that we will know how to do that (20-50 years according to Dyson)….or we don’t. Which is it? You say I don’t pretend to know how the hierarchy of compatibility with photosynthetic pathways in simple and complex plants will evolve as syn bio grows in sophistication ( and photosynthetic bandwidth). However Dr. Dyson asserts that he knows. Can you give us some clues as to what Dr. Dyson specifically has in mind?
Let’s look at photosynthesis, metabolic pathways and production of stuff by plants. Dyson proposes trees that bury carbon underground in a chemically stable form, or that convert carbon into useful fuels. However we, and trees, already know how to do much of this already. A tree grow beautifully without any requirement for us messing around with it, and we can cut it down and bury it under anaerobic conditions (dump it in an anoxic swamp). Or we can burn it as a “useful fuel”. Unfortunately we consider these are not actually very helpful in the real world, much in the same way as we know that biochar is going to make only a very small, at best, contribution to these problems. And of course we can’t burn the tree (“useful fuel”) and bury it too (carbon sequestration). However these are the most efficient ways of pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, or making “useful fuel”, using trees.
Since these aren’t likely to be very useful in the grand scheme, how about making the tree do these things in its living form? Let’s say we’d like the tree to supplement its normal growth/metabolic expenditure (its “cost of living”) by 50% which additional photosynthetic/metabolic activity would be “spent” either on carbon burial or “useful fuel” production. Remember that these are some of the most energy expensive processes in the biosphere, since it takes a whole lot of energy to pull electrons off water and put them onto carbon (so we can make polymers to bury or fuels to burn). Where does the excess energy to power these processes come from? Photosynthesis, a process (light reaction) designed to pull electrons off water. Fine, but how do you boost photosynthetic activity/efficiency in our modified trees? Perhaps Dyson would care to tell us.
And so on. I don’t think we are anywhere remotely in the ball park of boosting photosynthetic activity so that trees can divert some of their metabolic energy to making stuff on a scale that is realistic (as opposed to rubber, cotton, maple syrup production that trees can do quite well already as part of their natural functions in wound protection, seed dispersal and attracting pollinators) or burying stuff, nor are we anywhere near finding/inventing metabolic pathways for non-degradable carbon sequestering, let alone producing the requisite transgenic plants/trees.
If we’re going to take Dr. Dyson seriously we need some more specific practical details of what specifically he has in mind….
30 May 2008 at 10:41 AM
Re #234. Trivial point of information: Dyson has no doctorate.
30 May 2008 at 10:47 AM
Re: #234, Re: diamonds, polymers, squared trees, but why not simple charcoal?
It looks very much that you can use lots of trees as useful fuel and have useful carbon sequestering too: Use wood gas, tars and oils, but bury the charcoal.
E.g. use standardized wood pellets to power your wood gas hybrid car, dump the char at the wood gas station and receive some carbon credits.
But that’s perhaps not fancy sexy tech enough? After all, wood gas cars had been used already around WWII.
For carbon balance sake it need to be dying trees. Ask the bark beetle or the forest fire devil where you can find masses of eligible trees.
Perhaps that char thing is just too simple to come to the mind of eminent theoretical phsycists or eminent economists?
30 May 2008 at 11:10 AM
Ray Ladbury wrote: “We don’t have workable solutions …”
I would argue that we do have workable solutions — that organic agriculture and maximally efficient use of clean electricity from wind and solar, supplemented with geothermal, hydropower and agricultural biofuels, can provide a sustainable, comfortable material standard of living for the world’s human population while reducing GHG emissions to near zero, and that we already know how to achieve this within decades using existing technology.
I am, however, extremely pessimistic that this will actually be achieved — there are too many wealthy and powerful people lusting after the trillions of dollars in profit to be had from burning every last crumb of coal and every last drop of oil, who will do everything in their considerable power to postpone the inevitable phaseout of fossil fuels as long as possible.
Achieving a “new industrial revolution” to replace the world’s fossil fuel energy economy with one based on clean, renewable, sustainable, zero-carbon energy technologies within a couple of decades will certainly require resources and effort. But the tough obstacles are not technical or economic; they are political.
30 May 2008 at 12:12 PM
Re # 235 O.K. thanks, I’ll remember that (no doctorate).
Re # 236, charcoal does actually slowly oxidise in soil back to CO2 (see # 187). However I agree with you that we can do a little bit with charcoal. There are lots of little (and not so little) solutions.
I’m not suggesting btw that we don’t continue to pursue research into science-fictiony things like artificial photosynthesis and “carbon-eating” trees (a better term is needed since trees already “eat” carbon). However we already have quite a good “photosynthesis” analogue (i.e. photovoltaic solar energy and its variants), and these still maturing technologies are bound to continue to provide incremental improvements in efficiencies, costs and so on. These can be used efficiently in areas where trees won’t grow at all (e.g. deserts), they don’t need watering and they can be connected directly to the grid. They may also not be as exciting as “carbon-eating” trees. But if we consider we have a problem to address, then we shouldn’t be pretending that we can sit back and wait to be saved by our science fictiony solutions.
30 May 2008 at 12:13 PM
Those referencing the “square trees” concept might note that the original story was datelined April 1. Perhaps just a coincidence…
30 May 2008 at 12:19 PM
re 233
Chris avers:’if we’re going to take Dr. Dyson seriously we need some more specific practical details of what specifically he has in mind….
That’s why I began by suggesting we might ask him, and I hope RC will invite him to comment. To which end I’ll call Raypierre to suggest a possible intoduction.
The point is that what we want - materials fit for carbon sequestration on century-to-millennium timescales - _may_ be metabolically accessible , but as they convey scant evolutionary benefit, are unlikely to be found in existing plant genomes. That’s why un-natural selection by molecular design and enzyme directed synthetic biology is being developed. Biopolymers are already part of that program, and it remains to be discovered whether , at the economic margin, they can play a role in carbon sequestration.
Since soon we find out how plausible the development of ( Insert Name of Desired Polymer Here )-ase may be is a function of how may biochemists think about it, I’m rather glad Dyson has raised the question in the ubiquitously read NYRB -
30 May 2008 at 12:26 PM
Re # 234 I have my doubts that genetically modified trees will every sequester sufficent carbon underground in their roots to be of any value, and I am skeptical about the prospect of trees producing oil. But, researchers are using algae to produce an oil that can be converted into fuel: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22027663/
Of course, the economic feasibility and environmental impact of this process are not yet clear, but it likely holds far more promise than Nordhaus’ and Dyson’s carboniverous, carbon-sequestering trees.
30 May 2008 at 12:41 PM
Re:#,152, Geoff Wexler’s reply to my post: #62
I said, in part:-
“other scientists who also assumed 60 years ago that Physicists like him would crack the nuclear fusion problem in a few years !”
Geoff replied in part :-
They got the time constant wrong but not the rapid rate of progress. As far I can see Freemon Dyson’s little discussion about 4%/annum growth in real terms for a century is based on assuming Moore’s law (exponential growth) for everything! But the only example apart from megaflops per person, for which this is valid is nuclear fusion.
I am confused. Firstly to clarify, my use of the word assumption was ‘tongue-in -cheek’ – the assumption that technology would save the day and not any sort of financial assumption.
Secondly,
One way to read your reply would suggest nuclear fusion is up and running. Is it?
30 May 2008 at 12:56 PM
Let’s try this from the basic arithmetic perspective. Just looking at petroleum estimates are that each year, we burn a volume of petroleum that is 1 km x 1km x 4.5 km - 4.5 billion cubic meters, or 4.5 trillion liters.
When we burn petroleum, we are going in the thermodynamically favorable direction: crude oil + oxygen goes to carbon dioxide + water + free energy. If we wish to reverse the process, we need to use energy - which is what plants do when they fix CO2. Plants require an aqueous environment to do this - this is why alpine plants and desert plants are small yet old - liquid water is not readily available for most of the year, and the “growing season” (i.e. the net carbon fixation season) may only be a few weeks out of the year. Even if water is available, growth can be nutrient-limited or toxin-limited. Air pollution, for example, seriously stunts tree growth, as does a lake of nitrogen and phosphate in the soil.
Now, plant breeding has resulted in some very high-yielding varieties - but the less-discussed fact is that you only get those yields by applying high levels of fertilizer and ample water - and also only if you have good growing conditions - no sudden freezes, heat waves or floods. What are the extreme weather forecasts for the future? What kind of impacts on crop production have we seen already?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070316072609.htm
Considering all that, let’s return to our arithmetic. We inject 4.5 trillion liters of crude oil into the atmosphere each year (yes, we are ignoring coal and natural gas, for now). Since there are ~7 billion people on the planet, that’s around 640 liters of oil per person per year. So, to offset petroleum emissions alone, each person would have to bury 640 liters of carbon deep in the ground each year.
But, there is a problem - since what we need to bury is not a jug of oil, but a gas that is only present at 380 parts per million in the atmosphere. On a mass basis, only 0.04% is CO2. The mass of air at sea level is about 1.3 kg per cubic meter. So, one cubic meter of air has about half a gram of CO2, roughly speaking. To make one liter of crude oil, you need about a kilogram of carbon… which will have to be extracted from thousands of cubic meters of air, and that will cost a lot of energy.
The higher end of tree sequestration rates are around 50 kg of carbon per tree per year. ( http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/haworth/jsf/2006/00000023/00000001/art00004 )
Thus, we get to the details: every man, woman and child on Earth will have to plant a minimum of about 15 fast-growing, healthy trees per year - every year, year in, year out - just to account for the petroluem use. To take into account natural gas and coal, double or triple that number, and since actual carbon fixation perfomance will be lower, double it again - soon, you are at a realistic estimate of 100 trees per person per year.
Let’s see: does it add up? (100 trees) (10-50 kgC/tree-year) (7 billion people) = 7-35 trillion kg of carbon/year = 7-35 billion tons of carbon. Current global emissions of CO2 are around 7 billion tons of carbon, projected to increase to 10 billion metric tons by 2025 by the US EIA.
So, yes - if every single man woman and child on the planet becomes a full-time (and very successful) forester, everything will be okay. Of course, as soon as the trees are full grown, they must be cut down and buried deep in the soil, or they will decompose back to CO2.
Let’s assume a feat of genetic engineering that creates trees that reliably fix 100 kg carbon/year. However, such rates would require optimal water, temperature and nutrient conditions. This is the fundamental issue that biotechnophiles seem to completely misunderstand. As it is, no one is anywhere near creating some “superorganism” - we can’t even create single-celled algae that have improved carbon fixation abilities, let alone trees!
This isn’t calculus, or tensor analysis, or anything like that - this is just basic arithmetic, after Broecker 2007: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/315/5817/1371
On the other hand, maybe some scientist will come up with the secret genetic formula for Jack’s Giant Beanstalk, and we can all stop worrying…
30 May 2008 at 1:02 PM
Dyson quotes this conclusion:
“the market price or penalty that would be paid by those who use fossil fuels and thereby generate CO2 emissions.”
I know right away the economist in question has a fundamental error because he does not seek restitution for those who keep their carbon footprint low.
This is an called exogenous model. Rewarding those who use less carbon makes the system endogenous.
You cannot solve the problem if you assume exogenous national policies because government is one of the oil consumers.
Economic equilibrium occurs when we have counterparty agreements, users and non-users. One can also derive this from property rights (I own the weather above my property). If my group commutes on bicycle, then my group suffers variant weather because another group drives cars. The cost of damages go from the car driver to the bicycle rider.
30 May 2008 at 1:50 PM
Just to continue arithmetics started by Ike at 243
“you are at a realistic estimate of 100 trees per person per year.”
Assuming a tree need an area of 10m2 for growing, 100*6,5 billion trees a year would need an area of 6500 billion m2 or 6,5 million km2. The land surface area of Earth is 148940000 km². Earth would be full forest in 23 years. In 79 years also the oceans would be filled with trees.
Well, at least it would be hard to drive a car in that forest.
30 May 2008 at 2:06 PM
Ike, you were talking about grains when you wrote
> you only get those yields by applying high levels of fertilizer and ample water - and also only
> if you have good growing conditions - no sudden freezes, heat waves or floods.
Look again (or look, if you haven’t) at the article linked above about chestnuts and hazelnuts. Heck, look at the website:
http://www.badgersett.com/
Don’t bother Phil and family; the MPR radio program linked above and the website have all the public info.
Don’t miss his point, which corrects yours — he picked a spot with poor water, sudden freezes, heat waves and floods and started working three decades ago to plant all sorts of native chestnut and hazenut collections, doing what’s called “mass selection” — letting nature kill 98 percent of your crop every year, planting seed from the survivors, continuing to add more wild type, and then work using crossbreeding and tissue culture to multiply the hardiest, best yielding plants.
Claimer — I’ve known him since before he got his farm. He’s always been smart about what he’s doing.
I wish he had Dyson’s PR, though.
30 May 2008 at 2:13 PM
SecularAnimist,
What you are talking about is a huge shift in infrastructure–not just building new infrastructure, but scrapping old infrastructure and swapping it for new. That has never really been done before. And it is not just social resistance. There are technical details that are still a long way from resolution. Yes, there are things we can do now, but we’re a long way from having a fire extinguisher. To gloss over this fact is risky.
30 May 2008 at 4:27 PM
Ike Solem (243) — Planting 100 trees per year isn’t much of a feat. Some men make their living by replanting after clear-cut ‘harvests’. A quick calculation suggests that about 300 seedings are planted per hour.
30 May 2008 at 7:32 PM
Re: 248. We have planted over 200 trees just on our property in the past 4 years. That’s in addition to hundreds on public lands. It’s not going to save the planet, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’m thinking about how we can turn the weeds from our garden into biochar. I think the thistles alone would account for a ton of carbon.
31 May 2008 at 12:39 AM
In #248, David B. Benson says: “Planting 100 trees per year isn’t much of a feat. Some men make their living by replanting after clear-cut ‘harvests’. A quick calculation suggests that about 300 seedings are planted per hour.”
I think that is a little high for planting trees. An old roommate of mine who grows seedlings for reforestation suggests that in the best of conditions, 200 trees per hour is a fast rate for women and men planters, resulting in 16,000 trees or more per day. But much of the land that is logged is quite steep, so the numbers are far smaller.
In addition, trees are planted quite close to one another, so ultimately, the number of surviving trees is much smaller. And unless herbicides are used to control brush and measures are taken to control deer and rodents, the numbers again are drastically reduced.
On top of that, young tree plantations are quite susceptible to fire, so often all this work goes up in smoke (and CO2). Growing trees (especially in the arid western United States) can be quite a challenge.
Also, some of our forests were established in periods of greater rainfall, so re-growing that forest after logging is not a simple task of putting seedlings into the ground. With ongoing climate change, some of the forests that are being logged today are not being “harvested;” they are being mined. Without extraordinary effort, these lands will not naturally become reforested.
31 May 2008 at 3:13 AM
Yo Ray! I’m in agreement on some of your specific points but not the thrust of what sounds like a GW catastrophe hypothesis. I’m asking how much, on what, and when not to be rhetorical but because these are the action items on the human agenda. Most informed observers (e.g. Dyson, Nordhaus, most here at RC) recognize that there is much greater risk of catastrophe if we do *nothing* than if we do *something*. The issue though is how much we spend on *something* and what we do, and also the likelihood of a catastrophic vs. an uncomfortable but manageable future. Yes, destruction of humanity is *possible* but it so very unlikely that we must look at the other side of the equation - the things we fail to improve by allocating resources to mitigation that could better be spent elsewhere.
Nick: Correct, there is no internal life to monetization calculator. However you can infer the value people put on their life in indirect ways or you can actually infer values from Government studies.
Also: It was noted correctly that Dyson has no PhD. But for clarity could we please note the following:
Dyson is one of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists.
Dyson’s mentor: Richard Feynman. Associations with many other international PhD experts in physics.
Cornell waived the normal “PhD on your resume deal” so he could teach there. Why? He was one of the world’s top thinkers.
Oh yes, Dyson is one of the handful of members of the Royal Society. Isaac Newton didn’t have a PhD, either.
———————-
31 May 2008 at 5:50 AM
A serious problem with using these economic calculations to evaluate harm:
- How do you quantify the harm attributable to a loss of biodiversity (to my mind, the most serious consequence of GW)? We’re talking about a changed world, not a dent in the car. To some extent, you can talk about the loss of initial starting points for new medicines, etc. But that’s really not the whole story.
- Even if you were to NOT act on C-O2 and to save the corresponding monies in a bank account at a 4% interest rate for the great payoff (and that is the concept behind Net-Present-Value calculations that Dyson, Lomborg, etc. use), when the day arrives, where do I go to buy a new planet? I’ll be sitting there with all this money: Where do I send away for a new coral reef, to re-install in the neighborhood of Australia? Amazon-galactic?
These quantitative tools can be useful, but let’s not forget the old adage: If all you have is a hammer, you tend to think of everything as a nail.
31 May 2008 at 7:10 AM
Bogometer alert: “100 trees per person” has incorrectly become “100 trees per person per year”. The former is correct - a tree fixes CO2 throughout its life.
Don’t focus on the planting, focus on the harvesting. A lot of seedlings in a plantation won’t make it to their first birthday.
I have been saying for some years that we need to be harvesting and replanting a huge amount of fast-growing vegetation every year, and sequestering it somewhere it won’t rot (deep underground is only one of several options here). The best type of fast-growing vegetation varies between climates, but most of it will be trees.
31 May 2008 at 9:24 AM
Joseph Hunkins–when dealing with uncertain risks, the accepted way of estimating the risk is to take the probability distribution of the probability of a particular threat and multiply it by the cost should that threat be realized. Then one integrates over the parameter(s) of interest (in this case either sensitivity or projected temperature rise). Although we have done a pretty good job of constraining CO2 sensitivity, there is still a significant proportion of the probability distribution above, say 4.5 degrees per doubling. And the costs rise so rapidly above 3 degrees that this region dominates the risk calculus. If we add the fact that we know natural ghg emissions will kick in, swamp the anthropogenic emissions and rip away whatever control we could exercise, then we have a very strong case for very vigorous action NOW so that we can come up with mitigation strategies and better refine our understanding of the right-hand side of the probability distribution.
That is the economic calculus we should be using.
As to Dyson, nobody denies that he’s a smart guy. I personally believe that he has to most Simon pure of motivations (his sympathies for international development are well documented). My question is this: When you are looking for a practical action plan, should you be asking a theoretical physicist?
31 May 2008 at 9:25 AM
So much of the policy discussion is “missing the forest for the trees.” It’s like a smoker asking “What monetary value should be applied to the risk of getting lung cancer?” “How does the economic damage from ruining the tobacco industry compare to the cost of medical treatment?”
Then along comes Freeman Dyson and says, “Don’t worry — we can bioengineer a cure for cancer.”
I say: QUIT SMOKING.
31 May 2008 at 10:18 AM
Look, there’s a much better way to sequester carbon. Have you read the figures on the total amount of topsoil that was on North America before the Europeans came? Figure the carbon sequestered in fifteen feet of topsoil.
And nature keeps trying to put it back. Gardeners everywhere are out edging their walks, removing the plants growing up through their patio pavement, digging around their foundations to remove the accumulating new formed soil as it rises up.
This is how older civilizations got buried, not just in their own debris, but in the topsoil formed around and eventually over them.
if you really want to sequester carbon, go buy a burned over eroded piece of mineral soil wasteland and start composting, as well as planting.
Oh, and make sure to fence out the offroad motorcycle/ATV crowd, the worst cause of erosion known.
31 May 2008 at 10:41 AM
“Yo Ray! I’m in agreement on some of your specific points but not the thrust of what sounds like a GW catastrophe hypothesis. I’m asking how much, on what, and when not to be rhetorical but because these are the action items on the human agenda. Most informed observers (e.g. Dyson, Nordhaus, most here at RC) recognize that there is much greater risk of catastrophe if we do *nothing* than if we do *something*. The issue though is how much we spend on *something* and what we do, and also the likelihood of a catastrophic vs. an uncomfortable but manageable future. Yes, destruction of humanity is *possible* but it so very unlikely that we must look at the other side of the equation - the things we fail to improve by allocating resources to mitigation that could better be spent elsewhere. …” - Mallard E. “WHAT-ME WORRY?” Neuman
I think you need to start clearly describing what you mean by uncomfortable. Based upon your past comments, I suspect your soothing Lomborgian notions of uncomfortable are uncomfortably close to destruction.
It would be nice if you could quantify uncomfortable in terms of how much CO2 you are willing to tolerate in the atmosphere, how much SLR you think is tolerable, etc.
31 May 2008 at 11:26 AM
Re # 249 Ray Ladbury: 200 trees planted in four years (and responses)
For what it’s worth:
According to a recent article in the Washington Post (don’t know where the author got his/her figures*, but the article frequently refers to CaseTrees, www.caseytrees, a D.C.-based charity established to protect and restore D.C.’s urban forest), a two-person household is responsible for releasing 41,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. To offset that, each household would have to plant 483 trees and let them grow for 10 years (presumably to reach maturity). The CO2 fixation rates (in pounds per year) for some common trees (roughly 5-10 years old, with a six inch diameter trunk) are:
Black Gum - 176
Little Leaf Linden - 176
American Elm - 159
Hickory - 159
Red Maple - 108
*According to my calculations, using the 176 lbs of CO2 fixed per year at maturity, those 483 planted trees will be removing 85,008 lbs of CO2 per year, more than double what the two people are causing to be emitted. Adding two children to the mix would seem to put the family and their trees roughly in carbon balance.
Also mentioned in the article: Planting trees to shade your house during mid-day in the summer can increase the “carbon benefit” by some 15-fold.
31 May 2008 at 11:34 AM
Lackner’s getting some press:
31 May 2008 at 12:09 PM
Nick Barnes wrote: “..we need to be harvesting and replanting a huge amount of fast-growing vegetation every year, and sequestering it somewhere it won’t rot”
May I ask where the energy will come from for this enormous project of planting, cutting, transporting vast amounts of vegetation, how would it be paid for, and how prevented from decaying ?
It reminds me of the sublime quote further up the page, ‘In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not’.
Arm chair tree planting is so easy. 300 trees an hour ? That should be an Olympic sport. How many of you can dig a hole while carrying a heavy bag of seedlings, bend down, plant a seedling, straighten up, take a few paces, repeat, in 30 seconds, non-stop, for an hour, or 8 hours ? Nevermind the rough terrain, and the fact that trees may need watering, get eaten by rabbits, overwhelmed by competitive vegetation, attacked by diseases…Don’t mean to sound negative, I adore trees, but the ideas need to be practical and realistic, don’t they ?
31 May 2008 at 12:21 PM
And another thought regarding sequestration of huge amounts of vegetation. You’re not just taking CO2 out of the air. You’re also taking all the other chemical nutrients out of the soil which plants and trees require. So, the next time around that land (where is all this spare land free for growing stuff, anyway ?) will be depleted of vital minerals and water. So,does that mean additional expensive fertilizer (with a massive carbon footprint) has to be distributed over the theoretical vast areas ?
Anyone remember the East African ground nut scheme ?
31 May 2008 at 12:40 PM
#242
Bob Clipperton (UK) Says
“the assumption that technology would save the day and not any sort of financial assumption.Secondly, One way to read your reply would suggest nuclear fusion is up and running. Is it?”
Sorry there is more than one argument being tangled up. My point was that prolonged exponential growth in any area was the exception rather than the rule.
As for your main point, I agree that it would be most unwise to rely on unproved technology to save the day especially if no one is prepared to pay for developing it. But I am not happy with your form of reasoning.
The Zeta project in the UK was hyped by the media and involved some degree of chauvinism. It very soon led to a disappointment. But you can’t use that against Dyson unless he participated in the hype.
It reminds me of the notorius ice age myth i.e. that climatologists can’t be trusted because there was about one paper in the 1970’s which raised the possibility that the cooling from aerosols might dominate the warming thus leading to an ice age.
(William Connolley has written on this).
Nuclear fusion is not running but it is quite astonishing how much progress has been made in the last half century. ITER is designed to come very close to “reactor conditions”. We might be able to find out whether fusion might help with the CO2 crisis especially if the project was made top priority. But the opposite appears to be happening and the project is being subjected to a deep funding cut. That is not a good omen for other technological remedies.
RE #254. (Ray Ladbury)
“…should you be asking a theoretical physicist? ‘
Why not ? I usually agree with you but not with that sentence. Isn’t the other Ray (Pierrehumbert) a theoretical physicist; is he also to be banned? Engineers are also not immune from making crazy suggestions for solving this problem. Consider them all but skeptically.
31 May 2008 at 12:49 PM
Discounting in the economic sense (ASAIK) works best on projects of known duration (within reason), *and* that also satisfy the condition that they are a small fraction of the total economy. The reason for this is largely to do with the manner in which different plans for the project may alter the net present value cost of project. In the extreme case of not doing the project at all, or following a particularly daft spending pattern, the cost differences to the total economy is negligible.
Whatever the framework used to set up the calculations, the main point with projects of finite duration and of impact epsilon upon the whole economy, is that the eventual go/nogo decision matters little to the population/economy at large, on the time scale of the project. The path chosen has imperceptible perturbation upon the economy, however important it may be for the firm proposing the project.
In the case of climate change due to our entire economy’s activity, the project of ‘fixing AGW’ is one of potentially large consequence to the economy; the specific path chosen may change the entire direction of the economy over the course of the project; the project duration is so long that the economy as a whole cannot be treated as a static background; and finally, while most firm level projects have some combination of risk and uncertainty in them, there is usually a historical database for comparison as a guide.
For AGW we are in desperate need of even a plausible distribution family for risk based calculations (sure, EVT could be an alternative approach), let alone an economic science that can cope with fundamental path shifts in entire economies. While climate models are clearly no substitute for real experiments, they are the only things we’ve got so far that can point to the levels of uncertainty for BAU, and for a first guess at an empirical distribution for the physical aspects of climate change under a range of scenarios. Paleo data is mighty handy too, but no global economies were in existence back then, and one Earth history of climate is far from a set of controlled experiments. An additional advantage of the climate models is the physics incorporated, which constrains the possibilities substantially.
Then of course, there is the whole dimension of what monetary value should be assigned to having a lot of nice flora and fauna and country-side; personally I’m quite partial to it!
31 May 2008 at 1:10 PM
Ray Ladbury wrote:
There are a LOT of things we could be doing now with existing technology — e.g. efficiency improvements for vehicles, buildings and appliances; clean electricity generation from thermal solar, photovoltaics, and wind power — that could make a huge difference very rapidly. The reasons we are not doing these things are political, not technical. And what is most urgently needed to move forward more rapidly with these solutions is not technological advances, but regulatory and economic measures such as carbon taxes, mandatory efficiency standards, tax credits for renewable energy investments, renewable portfolio requirements for utilities, and feed-in tariffs for small distributed solar and wind electricity producers (FITs have been highly successful in encouraging the growth of distributed solar in Germany, for example).
If we are not making maximum use of readily available existing technology to reduce emissions and produce carbon-free energy, if we are not taking the steps that we are able to take now to begin building the renewable energy infrastructure of the future, then what is the point of discussing pie-in-the-sky science fiction ideas like genetically-engineered trees that suck CO2 out of the air and produce diamonds as fruit?
31 May 2008 at 1:11 PM
This article has to be right because it confirms all of my forest prejudices.
31 May 2008 at 1:14 PM
Ray, Richard Feynman had a reputation for being practical, even when non-conventional.
31 May 2008 at 2:06 PM
Another problem with trees is that after harvesting the wood cannot be burned and must be protected from decay indefinitely. Particularly it must be protected from termites that would convert much of the stored carbon to methane. This includes the roots.
31 May 2008 at 2:25 PM
Thinking about the questions and problems I suggested regarding “harvesting and replanting a huge amount of fast-growing vegetation every year, and sequestering it somewhere it won’t rot”, etc.
To get around the tree planting problem, use biofuel coppice willow, which is very easy to establish, only needs planting once.
Where to plant ? Possibly on the Canadian and Siberian tundra which will be thawing out (and releasing methane) ?
How to harvest it in a carbon neutral fashion ? I don’t know.
How to sequester the carbon ? How about processing the wood into chips, (extracting useful elements) and mix and compress with glassy carbon into useful products, like bricks, tiles, cladding ?
I’m not an industrial chemist, so there’s possibly some big flaw I’m missing, but it seems more do-able than Dyson’s hypothetical GM trees.
31 May 2008 at 2:31 PM
Jim Eaton (250) — Thanks.
31 May 2008 at 3:00 PM
Well, physicists can actually do practical things
The great negawatter
Art Rosenfeld has done OK.
Nobel physicist Burton Richter gave a nice talk to a small town meeting here a few years ago on climate & energy (parts of the PPT here, since for general audience). His verbal comments were rather firm, especially in reply to questions about existence of scientific consensus.
31 May 2008 at 7:17 PM
Donald Oats (263) raises a salient and valid objective point regarding the deficiences of discounting in dealing with things like AGW (or nuclear winter, or nuclear WWIII, I suppose). I feel obligated to second this as I pointedly supported (and still do) discounting in earlier posts.
31 May 2008 at 9:09 PM
WRT my dig at theoretical physicists–I was not implying that theoretical physicists can never be practical. Ferchrissake, Oppenheimer was at theoretical physicist with a reputation for thin skin and dilletantism when he took on the Manhattan Project. Probably nobody (except maybe Fermi) could have done it as well. It is just that when you think, “I need practical advice,” the next sentence that pops into your mind is rarely “Quick, get me a theroretical physicist.” Dyson has always been a “big picture” kind of visionary physicist, and vision can be synonymous with hallucination.
31 May 2008 at 9:16 PM
SecularAnimist, I 100% agree that we could be doing much more with existing technology. In looking at the latest economy cars, nearly all of them get less gas milage than their previous year’s incarnation. Hell, they get worse gas milage than my 13 year old Honda Civic with 222000 miles on it.
The thing is that they will not reduce our CO2 emissions by 50%, or even 20% any time soon. Produce a plug-in electric hybrid that gets 110 mpg, and sells for $10 K and maybe you will have 20% market penetration in 5 years. Replacing existing infrastructure takes time. That is why I have a lot more faith in building green infrastructure in developing countries in the near term.
I am always thinking about ways of making a difference, but when you do the math, the difference it makes is usually depressingly small.
31 May 2008 at 9:23 PM
John Mashey, Had the pleasure of working with Art Rosenfeld when I did physics journalism. Note that his adviser and mentor was Fermi–who did both theoretical and experimental physics. Art was actually an experimentalist in particle physics. He’s an idol of mine in that he really has tried to use physics for bettering of human lives. I note again Rosenfeld’s law–I don’t think it’s gotten nearly enough attention. It has held for over 150 years!
1 June 2008 at 12:01 AM
Can anyone confirm the research by Jeffrey S. Dukes that we are using the equivalent of 4 centuries of current entire earth biosphere production every year of fossil fuels? (reference: http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf)
If this is true, then it is absolutely futile to assume that modern civilization in terms of its current energy use is sustainable with any sort of bio fuel.
Likewise, given this figure, if it true, I cannot see how the biosphere (even genetically engineered) could come anywhere near fixing the CO2 that we are currently releasing.
1 June 2008 at 4:21 AM
Can someone please educate me about GHG emission trading. You take money from GHG emitters and give it to worthy causes. The problem is, I cannot think of many worthy causes. Almost all money that is spent on physical activity (as opposed to share trading, for example) generates GHG almost by definition.
Sure, some emission trading can result in more efficient energy generation like closing brown coal power stations and replacing them with nuclear. Some say we should be preparing hydrogen powered cars because they emit mainly water, but water is a GHG itself. Some say we should plant more trees, but unless we manage their larger mass forever we have caused just a temporary blip in the cycle of Nature.
So, what can we buy with emission credits that is TRULY a gain? At the moment, it seems like the Gates to Scamland are wide open. The flow of money is potentially incredibly large and the ways to spend it wisely incredibly small.
1 June 2008 at 7:13 AM
Off Topic
Is Arctic Sea Ice about to Drop off a cliff?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
The melting is hapenning faster than it was in 2007 now and the levels are the same now. In Mid June 2007 the ice droped very quickly, will the same happen this year. Surely the ice is thinner and younger this year so it more than likely. Is this going to be a new record year?
1 June 2008 at 8:56 AM
The bottom line here is that none of these sequestration strategies will have any chance of reducing atmospheric CO2 whatosever unless the use of fossil fuels is halted. All initiatives that claim to address carbon emissions while ignoring the issue of of our ever-mounting fossil CO2 emissions are dishonest, in other words. Solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, energy conservation - all will do nothing to halt global warming. Really - not a single thing.
This is because global energy demand continues to increase. As it is, all new renewables are mostly going to meet new demand, not to replace existing fossil fuel generation. Economically, replacing fossil fuel plants with renewable energy systems would be expensive and unprofitable for energy corporations, since government policy is deliberately intended to provide the global economy with an ever-increasing stream of fossil fuel energy. Right now, we are producing more crude oil per year than ever before - and probably more than we ever will again - though there is plenty of coal.
So far, the attempts at carbon sequestration have been a flop. FutureGen, the large and secretive alliance managed by Battelle Memorial Institute for the U.S. DOE and Southern Coal, has been shut down, probably due to gross failure in the secret and proprietary technology involved, although noone involved with the project will talk about it - a good candidate for a Congressional investigation there. Jim in #259 points to a somewhat similar situation:
This looks about as promising as FutureGen. However, note here that all the energy expended was simply to counter the entropy factor - simply to collect all the CO2 from the air in pure form. CO2 is a gas, and if you want to store it permanently you have to stabilize it - essentially, that means turning it into a solid block of coal or a carbonate mineral. That will take a good deal more energy - and this team hasn’t even built a working prototype yet. All in all, the story merely serves to promote the myth that a technological solution is feasible, and that we can go on burning fossil fuels with no concerns. Just another PR gimmick.
What this really means is you have to stop fossil fuel use. You have to shut down all the Canadian tar sands projects, and the U.S. coal fields in Montana and Virgina, and there will be no global market in petroleum or natural gas. That’s the only way to combat climate change, period. Everyone who ignores this basic, though politically and economically troubling, fact is playing a rather dishonest game. Cap and trade strategies are just as laughable as global carbon sequestration strategies in this regard. Not a single one of these “initiatives” has done anything to even slow the rate of emissions growth - we are very far away from seeing an actual reduction in fossil CO2 emissions.
Yes - so far, the record has been one of dismal, abject failure on the part of those hoping to reverse this trend. Indeed, we have even seen a sudden rise in emissions over the past few years, with no end in sight. Government policy continues to support fossil fuel development and hinder renewable energy development - and government financing is being dumped into these nonsensical sequestration strategies, which are little more than good PR for the fossil fuel industry, while the really promising technological solutions - the ones needed to replace our energy source after the elimination of fossil fuels - are being neglected. Take the International Institute for Renewable Energy - it has eight university members, but not a single U.S. one. Not a single U.S. university has a world-class, well-funded, renewable energy program - because political fossil fuel-linked interests keep the funding from being directed to renewables.
P.S. (Hank Roberts - that comment referred to the very high yields generated under optimal conditions by plants from modern breeding programs, GMO or not. Your farm used a far better approach, using natural selection to choose the best mix of forest cover - but actual “yields” from that patch will be far, far lower than that from a fertilized, watered, and optimized crop. Reforesting a little patch of bare earth, while great for the local environment, will do nothing to sequester carbon on the scale needed. See comment #245 as well)
1 June 2008 at 10:18 AM
Geoff Sherrington, You seem to be as confused by cap and trade as you are about the physics of the greenhouse mechanism. First, the latter–yes, H2O is a ghg. No, it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for centuries as does CO2, so its impact is less per unit mass.
As to cap and trade, the idea is to ensure that the market reflects the full price of production–including environmental degradation. There is certainly potential for abuse, but that goes part and parcel with human activity. One could argue that this is our evolutionary midterm exam. Better start cramming.
1 June 2008 at 10:25 AM
CL: harvesting in a carbon-neutral fashion: wood-chip digesters of various sorts (the most basic sort being wood-chip steam power). Of course there’s carbon cost there, but we can definitely come out ahead.
Willow coppice is good, for places where it grows. In 20 years of being associated with my father’s forestry work the most important thing I have learned is to choose tree species which will grow well on your land; for a lot of the land in question this is probably willow or conifers of one sort or another. (the second most important thing I have learned is that grey squirrels are agents of the devil).
The land: there are huge areas of otherwise unproductive land in Europe and Asia. We had a couple of conifer plantations in north Wales - Sitka Spruce, mostly. All the deciduous trees the Forestry Commission made us plant around the edges died as seedlings. The thirty miles or so of land between the two was almost all given over to upland sheep-grazing, than which there are few more worthless uses of moorland. There’s water aplenty, running off your hat, down your back, into your boots.
Sequestering the resulting carbon: I gather that charcoal is the way to go: reduces mass and bulk, and deters decay and insects, without losing much carbon.
The nitrates for a huge carbon harvesting program would have to be provided, so there’s also some carbon cost there. Just conceivably a hugely expensive, clever, and lucky research program could come up with some nanotechnological approach to fixing carbon in 30 years. In the meantime, we can (we must) fix it the old fashioned way, with trees.
1 June 2008 at 10:32 AM
pete best@277: yes, the sea ice isn’t looking too pretty. Could be a record (and in fact I have money riding on it) but it all depends on the weather. Don’t forget that last year had really remarkable weather.
Wayne Davidson is predicting record warmth for this summer, based on his light refraction observations. But I haven’t heard anything from him for a month or so. It would be interesting to hear his personal views of the weather and sea ice conditions at Resolute.
In the meantime, I’m watching these composite photos with interest:
http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/ice_image21/
(the ones called D.NHEAVEH.GIF)
I’m also waiting for the first arctic reports from the Polarstern, currently en route north from the Antarctic.
1 June 2008 at 10:41 AM
Ike Solem wrote :
“CO2 is a gas, and if you want to store it permanently you have to stabilize it - essentially, that means turning it into a solid block of coal or a carbonate mineral. That will take a good deal more energy”
Are those really the only alternatives ? What about vitreous carbon,or carbon fibre or nanofoam composites ? I’m thinking that something useful with a market value as an incentive is more likely to be considered than turning coal back into coal. (And where do you put all the newly made coal ?) e.g. an inert carbon or carbon based material that could be made such as house brick or roof tile or road aggregate, something that will sequester the carbon for thousands of years, and be reusable, like clay bricks that last millennia.
1 June 2008 at 10:45 AM
Sequestering carbon is crucial to the atmospheric health of our planet. So I’ll point out what should be obvious: we have a tremendous store of *already sequestered* carbon, called “coal.”
It makes less than zero sense to take coal out of the ground, burn it to release CO2 into the atmosphere, then expend effort and energy (using technology we don’t yet have!) to remove it. This is insanity! We need a moratorium on coal-fired power generation plants, and a *rapid* phase-out of existing coal-fired plants.
And I’m not at all convinced by arguments that solar, wind, and wave power won’t make a dent in our energy needs. The reason this seems to be true is that they’ll never be important if we leave their development entirely to the “free market.” Without a Manhattan-project (or larger) scale effort they can’t begin to supply a significant portion of our energy — but *with* such a project, they can. It’s high time for governments to make this happen by the rule of law, because capitalists, left to their own devices, will continue to gorge themselves on present-day profit at the expense of future planetary health.
Capitalism is a great economic system, essential to a healthy economy, but those who attach themselves to it as an ideology are dooming our civilization to exactly the “back-to-the-stone-age” misery that they so effectively use as a scare tactic to frighten people into doubt about global warming.
No more coal. Period.
1 June 2008 at 11:00 AM
pete best writes “Surely the ice is thinner and younger this year so it more than likely. Is this going to be a new record year?” This is a good question, and I am not sure what the answer is. In a very crude way, there are two types of ice; what I call “annual ice”, and ice that is over one year old. Each year, about 9 million sq kms of open water turn to ice during the “winter”, and the about the same amount melts every “summer”. This is “annual ice”, and by definition, it is always less than one year old. I understand it’s thickness is solely dependent on how long and how cold the “winter” was. This season, the “winter” was longer and colder than average in the Canadian part of the Arctic. In fact, the ice surface returned far more rapidly that it disappeared. So, one would not necessarily expect a rapid melt in places like Hudson Bay, and the North West Passage. However, the behaviour of ice that is more than one year old, I know very little about. As to whether this is going to be a record year for melting, there are already bets on this subject. Last year, July 1st (Canada Day) saw the most ice melt in one day than has been recorded since 1979. It will be interesting to see what happens this Canada Day, or there abouts.
1 June 2008 at 12:06 PM
CL says “Where to plant ? Possibly on the Canadian and Siberian tundra which will be thawing out (and releasing methane) ?”
Unfortunately there are no trees on the tundra because conditions are not suitable. Even 500 miles south of the tundra, well into the boreal forest zone, growth is slow. Twenty years after a forest fire the trees are still not 20 feet tall. There is also the problem of accessing these areas to plant and harvest the trees.
A couple more brief comments: I have long thought that biodegradable plastics are a mixed blessing. Of course we don’t want fishing nets floating around catching fish for a thousand years, but garbage dumps could be a means of sequestering carbon.
In the long term, the idea that large areas of cities are zoned for specific uses will have to be drastically modified to make it easier for more people to walk or bicycle to work and to stores.
1 June 2008 at 12:12 PM
Ike, you write:
> but actual “yields” from that patch will be far, far lower than that from a fertilized, watered, and optimized crop.
Ike, read the links for information about the actual crops, in real fields, rather than deciding and telling people that, based on your theory, they will not be competitive in the future. The woody agriculture crops are competing successfully with corn and soy now.
If you look only at the brief very best years of the old ‘green revolution’ you may have a point but that was a very long time ago and wasn’t sustained. The point is to sustain yield over the farmer’s economic lifetime, competitively.
It’s being done.
1 June 2008 at 12:46 PM
Richard Simmons wrote :
“Unfortunately there are no trees on the tundra because conditions are not suitable. Even 500 miles south of the tundra, well into the boreal forest zone, growth is slow. Twenty years after a forest fire the trees are still not 20 feet tall. There is also the problem of accessing these areas to plant and harvest the trees.”
Yes, I’m well aware why there are no trees on the tundra. However, we are already locked in to climate change which will effect the tundra, melting the permafrost, making a peaty swamp with warmer weather in the foreseeable future, when, I assume, willow trees would flourish.
I agree, access and harvesting pose additional problems.
I proposed the idea because it had been suggested that growing, harvesting, sequestering enormous quantities of vegetation might be a means to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. It might make sense, in theory. But, as shown by the biofuels fiasco, it’s obvious that all easily accessible fertile land is already being used.
I was thinking in terms of system we already use and understand, which I consider an advantage over fanciful imaginings about GM diamond trees, etc.
As I understand it, plant cellulose can be the basis for glassy carbon, which would appear to be a good product to aim for, or, at least, nobody has explained to me why not.
I agree, biodegradable plastic, judging from the examples I’ve seen, produces masses of small plastic particles which are just one more environmental problem.
1 June 2008 at 1:03 PM
CL, the limiting factor on growth in the tundra may be sunlight, not warmth. This is one reason why Canadian plains will not replace the US breadbasket as far as food production goes.
1 June 2008 at 1:23 PM
Yes, Ray, you may well be correct, that the limiting factor may be daylength. But, as I understand it, dwarf varieties of willow already grow there. Willow has myriad varieties and hybrid strains and will grow from one small stick pushed into the ground. Better than having to produce hundreds of thousands of rooted seedlings for transplanting. And it regrows after cutting. I can’t think of a better candidate to try, except maybe alder, which also fixes nitrogen so doesn’t require fertile soil. But the whole idea may be a non-starter. Seems to me, that if we cannot even stop destruction of existing forests and extraction of existing coal, there’s little hope of solving the problem anyway.
Perhaps the highest priority is to understand and explain why we cannot prevent forest destruction and coal mining. Personally, I believe I understand the reasons, but the politicians and voters seem not to.
1 June 2008 at 1:29 PM
Re #251 (Joseph Hunkins) “Nick: Correct, there is no internal life to monetization calculator. However you can infer the value people put on their life in indirect ways or you can actually infer values from Government studies.”
There are different ways of inferring values people put on things, and they do not in general give results consistent with each other - because of course there is no reality to discover, since people don’t generally put a monetary value on their lives. As for inferring values from Government studies, that might possibly tell you how the government concerned values lives, but that is in no sense an objective figure.
1 June 2008 at 1:58 PM
Not to mention the simple fact that the Canadian plains occupy far less area than the US breadbasket does.
1 June 2008 at 2:26 PM
#283 tamino, you’re joking, right? Common sense? Related to climate change? What planet are you from?
1 June 2008 at 2:33 PM
Re: #292 (Martin Vermeer)
Alas, common sense is uncommon.
But making it more common, starts with saying it out loud. Fortunately, I’m not the only one doing so.
1 June 2008 at 3:19 PM
Re:#159:Joseph Hunkins
You have claimed that according to most mainstream economists a later mitigation has an economical benefit.
Let’s take the following example:
The cumulative carbon emission in this example must be less than 300 GtC from the end of 2008 to every year until 3000. The same cumulative carbon emission in all cases ensures the approximately same environment impact. This has the advantage we can concentrate on economics only and need not to trade money for environment damage.
The carbon emission in 2008 are approximately 9 GtC.
Case A: early mitigation.
We stop the growth of carbon emission and decline the carbon emission at -3.093%/yr from 2010.
This results in the carbon emissions (GtC/yr)
2008 9.000
2010 9.000
2020 6.574
2030 4.801
2040 3.507
2050 2.561
2075 1.168
2100 0.532
Case B: later mitigation.
The growth of carbon emission continues until 2020 at 3%/yr and decline after at -7.079%/yr from 2020.
This results in the carbon emissions (GtC/yr)
2008 9.000
2010 9.548
2020 12.832
2030 6.158
2040 2.955
2050 1.418
2075 0.226
2100 0.036
The cumulative carbon emission is 300 GtC in each case.
You claim is that most mainstream economists would find that case B has economical benefit over case A. Could you explain how this happens?
Which use of the additional carbon emissions in the next years should be done to reach this especially to compensate the -7%/yr decline after 2020?
1 June 2008 at 3:27 PM
I don’t think afforestation of tundra will be a policy option, because it’s already happening with the rapidly changing arctic climate. Unfortunately, this has the effect of reducing the albedo of mid and high latitudes, which isn’t good news.
1 June 2008 at 8:20 PM
Re Australian droughts comments above: To make a pronouncement on rainfall trends in Australia based on national time series or even a Murray- Darling Basin (MDB) average if quite misleading given the areas involved. There is wide spatial variation in national rainfall patterns, far from uniform land use, and vast areas largely unoccupied.
Figure 2 here http://adl.brs.gov.au/mapserv/landuse/docs/Land_use_in_Australia_at_a_glance.pdf shows that the Australian rainfall issues are very important economically and socially as the areas affected are the capital cities and cropping zones. Much of Western Australia is desert or semi-arid so additional rainfall there is not relevant for agriculture or urban water supplies.
http://environment.gov.au/water/publications/mdb/pubs/mdb-map.pdf also shows the size of the Murray- Darling Basin and the very different catchment area of the upper Murray River compared to the Darling River.
So to confound any drought analysis with too wide an area misses very significant regional effects. Effects which appear to have some AGW influenced meteorological mechanisms.
There has been record or near record drought conditions in the Murray River headwaters, south-east Queensland water catchments (for city of Brisbane), and ongoing rainfall decline in south-west Western Australian wheat belt. Many capital cities in Australia now have water supply issues.
One can define drought as rainfall deficit for dryland cropping and grazing or alternatively in terms of stream inflows for irrigators and town water supply. Water inflows show record lows in Murray system - see slide 4 here http://www.greenhouse2007.com/downloads/keynotes/071004_Cai.pdf Multi-year sequences including El Nino events, and non-ENSO affected (neutral) years that also miss out on rainfall, exacerbate the impact of antecedent conditions i.e. very dry catchments that take a lot of rain to wet up again to produce runoff. Narrowly defining AGW impacts in terms of temperature only misses the major impact of water supply.
The Murray Darling Basin Commission has regular updates on the state of the Murray Darling Basin water supplies and the situation is indeed dire and ongoing. http://www.mdbc.gov.au/
Australia has obviously had major historical drought sequences, but as others have commented above, there is good evidence to suspect some “anthropogenic” influence at least in exacerbating the recent droughts around Australia. Changes in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, Southern Annular Mode, Indian Ocean and Tasman Sea present some interesting research challenges.
Indeed learning from history, the impacts of drought sequences documented in the MWP by Brian Fagan in his recent 2008 book “The Great Warming” make some sober reading.
I have discussed the issue much further at http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/drought-in-australia/#comment-18871 so won’t repeat those details here.
1 June 2008 at 8:34 PM
284- Jim, if you read this link carefully, I think you will see that the odds are roughly 25:1 that the Arctic ice will hit a new record low this year. The only way to miss is if more than 50% of the first year ice survives. That has happened only once in the last 25 years.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
1 June 2008 at 10:51 PM
All of the discussion of economic analysis and discount rates strikes me as being off the mark. When threatened, societies rarely use such analysis to select a response. A more constructive analysis would be to look at the least productive things we collective spend resources on and discuss the merits of transferring those resources to fossil energy alternatives including massive improvements in end use efficiencies. Others have already alluded to military spending as such an example. I have a great deal of trouble taking these economic arguments seriously when most of the US military expenditure goes to cold war weapon systems. Just who are we going to use new atomic submarines against? When the neo-liberal economists apply their analytical skills to take on the military industrial complex, I’ll take them more seriously. One should also ask, just who will benefits from the growth they postulate and who will be hurt the most by climate change. A little application of welfare economics seems called for.
2 June 2008 at 12:29 AM
[edit - please avoid personal comments]
Please read my # 276 again. I make the point that the massive monies being proposed for collection from GHG emission imposts far outweigh the known ways to spend them - without creating more GHG. Tell me please, of a few activities that that can be done with no GHG addition to the air. Realistic ones, useful products, within the lifetime of my grandchildren.
You did not understand what I said about forestry. To beneficially affect the carbon equation, you have to increase the mass of carbon per unit land area - and you have to keep that increased mass in perpetuity, otherwise if it reduces it will give off GHG and the whole exercise would be a transient bit of theft by smooth talking promoters.
And, by the way Ray, I, used to attend the management meetings of one of the largest forestry regrowth companies in the SW Pacific region. I even did a company audit of CO2 before most people were too concerned about it. Among other matters, we calculated the sequestration by various trees at different growth stages. Have you ever done that? You are strangely quiet on your qualifications, which I suspect are far inferior to mine.
Inferior like those who argue for huge social change before the science is settled on GHG - when correct SST adjustments for ship water buckets might account for 0.15 deg C of the 0.8 deg C of supposed global increase in the last century. [edit]
#298 Ted Nation. Take the money from efficient power stations, give the money to the poor so they can inefficiently burn more fuel? Now that’s a real solution.
2 June 2008 at 4:10 AM
Re 288, 291. For many species, sunlight is not that important. Warmth combined with enough moisture is more important. E.g. the wheat yield in Norway is almost
50 % higher than in the US. Norway does not have very much agricultural land though, so the total amount is not very large.
2 June 2008 at 5:35 AM
Tamino #283 advocates a total and unqualified ban on the global use of coal. Ike Solem #278 goes further and wishes not only to ban coal but to end the global market in petroleum and natural gas. Each claims that anyone disagreeing with him either lacks honesty or sanity. However, neither appears honest enough to face up to the demographic consequences of his recommendations.
The arrival or imminent arrival of peak oil has provided a much needed spur for the development and rapid deployment of alternative energy sources. This might greatly facilitate the fight against global warming. Clearly, however, a flight into coal without accompanying CCS would be almost literally suicidal to our progeny. Furthermore, it might well transpire that energy from coal, using CCS technolgy, will prove more expensive than other alternative energy technologies.
Tamino is almost certainly correct in his view that solar, wind and wave energy have the potential to become the dominant contributors to our needs but spoils his case by pejoritive comments on capitalists “who gorge themseves on present day profits”. Likewise, Ike Solem’s conspiracy theory rants over the evils of the oil companies detracts from his usually saner comments.
In summary, we could certainly save the planet from dangerous warming with existing technology if we were not too concerned about how many people survived the process. The difficult bit is to do so while the global population is on schedule to rise to 10 billion before its decline by natural causes can begin. Indeed, it may not be possible. If this is what Tamino and Ike Solem think, perhaps they would be honest enough to say so and lay out their policies for managing accelerated death rates.
2 June 2008 at 7:08 AM
#284 Jim Cripwell,
There is already open water at the Banks Island end of the North West Passage. The ice in there is much thinner than previous years. Also first year ice melts at a lower temperature because of salt/brine inclusion. Think of road gritting in reverse, the grit is intended to lower melt to below the night’s minimum temperature. In an arctic environment rising out of the winter cold first year ice melts preferentially as compared to the much less salty perennial ice.
I remain uncertain as to a new extent/area record this year (will it set another record?). But an open North West Passage looks very likely given current conditions in that part of the Archipelago.
#297 Ron Taylor.
I’m not sure your reference supports odds of 25:1.
If I can repeat some points I raised at Stoat (William Connelly’s blog):
Since 2002 perennial ice area has shown year-on-year record losses, prior to last year’s melt the area was ~2.6M km^2, down from ~4M km^2 in 2002(Nghiem 2007). And over this winter further perennial has been lost, I cannot find data to put that in context of those areas for March 2002/07. However, qualitatively the preceding trend of record lows in perennial area has once again been sustained this year.
Yet since 2002 we have still seen the autocorrelation behaviour noted by William Connelly, Cecilia Bitz and others (no new record after a preceding year’s record), despite the ongoing precipitous year-on-year decline in perennial area.
We’ll find out whether the NSIDC “first year ice survival method” has predictive power within a bit over 3 months.
Frankly I’m not totally sure we will see a new record, but certainly wouldn’t bet against it. Indeed it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole of the perennial mass off Greenland/Ellesmere, through to Banks, breaks into a mass of bergs. We could in a practical sense lose the ice cap this year, widespread fragmentation such as seen in the Beaufort Sea this winter would effectively be the “death” of the ice cap.
Whatever happens this year, excluding “force majeur” (comet/meteor/massive plinean eruption), the Arctic will be ice free in late summer within years.
2 June 2008 at 8:25 AM
Ref Cobblyworlds #302, and Rod Taylor #297. “There is already open water at the Banks Island end of the North West Passage. The ice in there is much thinner than previous years.” If you have a reference with regard to ice thickness, I would be grateful. The thickness of annual ice is of particular interest to me. One of the problems is that our Canadian government has no icebreaker capability for venturing into the Arctic in the winter, so they keep few statistics on the ice freeze; the same seems to be true at NSIDC. These organizations “come to life” when the melt starts. I had the privelege of some correspondence with Sheldon Drobot before he made his prediction, and he sent me the ULR as soon as it was available. I was unable to understand how he deals with year-to-year variations of annual ice thickness, and tried to get a dialogue going with him on this subject. However, he failed to answer my email; I am sure he is extremely busy, so I was not disappointed. It strikes me as res ipsi loquitor that the rate of melt must be somehow related to the thickness of annual ice. I have tried, and failed, to get any data that I find reliable. A friend spent part of this winter on the Blecher Islands, and he said the ice was thicker than in recent years. I heard a similar report from Barrow. I would dearly love to know how Sheldon treats annual ice thickness in his prediction method, and where he got the data from on this subject this year. It wont be long now, before we have some idea of what the ice will be like in the Arctic this September equinox. You may be interested in the following URL http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/Ice_Can/Arctic/CVCSWCTNCW.gif
2 June 2008 at 9:10 AM
Geoff Sherrington, I’m sorry, I presumed that you knew how to use Google. I’m not hard to find. I am but a lowly PhD in physics, a mere foot soldier trying to defend science against who grasp at straws (or sampling buckets) to avoid grasping the truth and who would let complacency subvert good science.
One advantage I have as a physicist is that I can look at the science and see that indeed some aspects are quite settled, and that these include the likely level of forcing due to CO2. Indeed most of the uncertainty that remains is on the high side of what the models assume.
I applaud your efforts at forestry. Now, one might ask why you were concered with carbon sequestration if not because of the settled science of greenhouse gasses, but if we asked that, you’d probably tell us.
I repeat my previous reply. The purpose of either cap and trade or carbon taxes is to ensure that prices of goods and services reflect their true cost of production–including environmental degradation. For this reason, it only makes sense to invest whatever funds accrue to government or other organizations (e.g. corporations set up to manage these assets) be spent to mitigate the likely effects of climate change. This can be done by investing in research for new energy sources, building new infrastructure, subsidizing energy-saving and green technologies, etc. We are looking at a massive replacement of infrastructure in the industrial world. In the developing world, it makes sense to subsidize green technologies to tip the economic balance in their favor over polluting technologies. I can think of a whole lot of things we could profitably spend the money on. If you thought about it, I’m sure you could, too.
2 June 2008 at 10:07 AM
Re: #301 (Douglas Wise)
I’m flattered to be put in the same category with Ike Solem.
It’s a pity that you didn’t pay close attention to what I said. I didn’t call for an immediate total and unqualified ban on the global use of coal, but a moratorium on coal-fired power generation plants and a rapid phase-out of existing coal-fired plants. Given that carbon sequestration is essential, it is indeed insanity to burn one of the largest reservoirs of already-sequestered carbon on the planet: coal. Building new coal-fired plants, when CCS isn’t yet possible, only undoes what is essential for the health of the planet and its inhabitants.
Your defense of capitalists who gorge themselves on present-day profit at the expense of future planetary health is nothing but hand-waving, and your unfounded implication that a rapid migration to renewable energy would lead to accelerated death rates very effectively proves my claim: that those who defend exploitation in the name of capitalism will doom our future while using that very same fate as a scare tactic.
2 June 2008 at 10:57 AM
Re #305, slightly unrealistic don’t you think seeing as how we are building new coal fired power plants all the time but I do agree with your sentiment and would personally like to see no non CCS based power plants built after a certain time, say 2010 to 2015 and a new means of replacing coal to come omline. However we need to keep the ligths on and it might take 20 years to convince the politicians and economists of a suitable alternative such as large scale wind and solar thermal plants that can take its place.
2 June 2008 at 11:01 AM
Geoff Sherrington, Ray Ladbury, Google Scholar. It’s not even funny.
2 June 2008 at 11:21 AM
Re: #303 (Jim Cripwell)
The server seems to be down right now, but this link has freeboard estimates for the icecap:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/040708.html
Thickness should be ~10 times freeboard.
2 June 2008 at 11:28 AM
Cobblyworlds, maybe I am misunderstanding the NSIDC info, but it seems to me that first-year ice would have a much more predictable melt season fate than multi-year ice. When they say that more than 50% would have to survive to miss a new record (which has only happened once in the last 25 years), that seems to my layman’s ear to be a rather strong statement. I assume of course that they are measuring the first year ice accurately, something that Jim seems to have doubts about.
2 June 2008 at 12:09 PM
Ref #308. I went to the URL and found the following “As the winter extent numbers indicate, new ice growth was strong over the winter. Nevertheless, this new ice is probably fairly thin”. I hardly call “probably fairly thin” a scientific and reliable data source as to how thick (or thin) the ice actually was. What I am looking for is a measure of this year’s annual ice thickness with reference to what the average annual ice thickness is. My instinct tells me that the thickness of annual ice, MUST be related to how cold and how long the winter was. And in the Canadian part of the Arctic, this past winter came early, and was very much colder than it has been for the past few years.
[Response: Thickness of sea ice is much more correlated to age than it is to the severity of any individual winter. This is because ridging and dynamical compression are better at growing thickness than bottom freezing. Therefore, multi-year ice is thicker than first year ice and almost all ice above a meter or so will be multi-year. See this for a picture of how the multi-year ice has changed. - gavin]
2 June 2008 at 12:51 PM
re Tamino #301.
I was disappointed in your kneejerk reaction to my post (#301). If you had read what I wrote, you would have noted that I didn’t disagree with you other than to suggest that it would be reasonable to expand energy from coal if, and only if, CCS could be deployed and was able to compete with alternative sources of energy. Thus, when you say “no more coal, period”, I would say , being British,”no more coal without affordable CCS, full stop”. In fact, this is the position of our Royal Society, the members of which are not primarily noted for their insanity.
In your second post that touched on the nature of capitalism, your original snide comment had apparently inflated into an all out attack. Originally, you described it as a great (essential in economic terms) system but implied that, when pursued unthinkingly as an ideology, that it could become dangerous. I agree. However, you will not win friends and influence people, which is presumably your intention, if you mix good science with ill-advised and unnecessary insults aimed at those in the best position to implement the policies that you would like to see. Certainly, it is incumbent upon our political leaders to set out the necessary policy goals before the capialists can respond appropriately. Alternatively, perhaps you would prefer to see democracy replaced by a command economy. This, too, might have its advantages in our current parlous state but only if the commands were the correct ones.
You accuse me of implying that I think that a rapid phasing-in of alternative technologies would lead to accelerated death rates. I don’t have sufficient expertise to have an opinion on the subject that is worth expressing, let alone worth listening to. It was your expert opinion that I was seeking. There is a bewildering variety of options available to us and, as a layman, I would appreciate guidance from an informed source. As a result of using RC as a source, I have, over the last year, been converted from a sceptic/agnostic to a firm believer on the subject of AGW. However, notably absent from any discussions of possible solutions has been any acknowledgement of our burgeoning population growth, growth which, sooner or later, will have to reverse if we are to hold out any hope of saving the planet.
Tamino, let’s not get off on the wrong foot. I would genuinely value your opinion as to whether you think that , were you in a position to implement all of the policies that you could wish for, you could prevent dangerous climate change while giving time for global population to level off naturally. I would be delighted with a convincing and affirmative answer. If you don’t think such a benign outcome is possible, then we are going to have to address some very unsavoury demographic solutions.
2 June 2008 at 1:45 PM
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if you go to wunderground dot com and check the weather in Greenland, every reporting weather station in Greenland is showing temperatures above freezing, with several above 50 degrees F.
2 June 2008 at 2:06 PM
You can see at http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
that the Arctic seaice melt is now already slightly ahead of last year’s record melt (at the same date). Fully in line with the high fraction of “first year ice”, I would say.
2 June 2008 at 2:39 PM
Ref 310. Gavin. I specifically referred to ANNUAL ice; ice which is, by definition, ALWAYS LESS than one year old. Annual ice is what I originally referred to, and it is the 9 million sq. kms. of ice which is open sea in the summer, and ice in the winter.
2 June 2008 at 3:01 PM
Tamino (283 & 305), I took your first post to mean that you’re against coal even when it is accompanied by CCS (carbon capture and storage). Even though I agree that it makes in principle more sense to use renewable energy, I do wonder why coal in combination with CCS should be avoided. Provided that the sequestration is safe until eternity, there isn’t much against it climate-wise (air pollution will remain of course, so that’s perhaps an answer to my own question). Your second post though makes me wonder if I misunderstood you.
2 June 2008 at 3:08 PM
#303 Jim Cripwell,
The open water near Banks Island.
See QuikScat http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/qscat_ice.pl
Here’s 30 May 2008 (last available ocean masked image - open water shown blacked out)
http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/ice_image21/D08152.NHEIMSK.GIF
Also note the thinning (darker) at the East end of Viscount Melville Sound/McClintock Channel (South of Bathurst Island). There has been some re-freeze and closure off Banks Island since it’s worst around day 147 of 2008, but any new freeze this late in the cycle will not survive the summer.
Ice Thickness.
From National Ice Service:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/products/arctic/index.htm
With reference to their “egg code” index:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/egg_code/index.html
Take these assesments for Canadian Arctic West:
2007, 21-25/5/07:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/West_Arctic/Canadian_Arctic_West/2007/canw070521color.pdf
2008 19-23/5/08:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/West_Arctic/Canadian_Arctic_West/2008/canw080519color.pdf
Just looking at Viscount Melville Sound; Over the last 12 months the amount of thick perennial has dropped massively, to be replaced by first year ice.
2007: Areas P & R are key areas:
P 6/10 perennial (over 2m), with 4/10 thick first year (over 1.2m).
R 8/10 perennial (over 2m), with 2/10 thick first year (over 1.2m).
2008: Area K is the key area:
K 1/10 perennial (over 2m), with 7/10 thick first year (over 1.2m) and 1/10 medium first year (0.7-1.2m).
Also if you look at 2008 above you’ll see some interesting structures to the East of Banks Island; W, M, and N leading to area AA. That’s the result of buttress failure. Check out this animated gif from Environment Canada watch closely just above Banks Island (mid way down) up to 9 January 2008, when it goes spectacularly:
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/content_contenu/SIE/Beaufort/ANIM-BE2007.gif
Out of interest, check out High East Arctic (centred on the pole iself). Last year predominantly thick perennial, now thick first year, hence the Serreze’s statement that the pole could be ice-free this year. Not all first year ice always melts though, and weather plus thickness are why I’m not sure we’ll see a new record. However with reference to PIOMAS: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/IDAO/retro.html
It may be that much of the first year ice from the preceding year was “saved” by the bulk of the perennial ice. In which case maybe I should have taken up William Connelly’s bet…
Thicker ice has tended to thin more rapidly than thinner first year ice. That’s because the thicker ice takes longer to grow than thinner (first year) ice. e.g. Bitz & Roe 2004 “A Mechanism for the High Rate of Sea Ice Thinning in the Arctic Ocean.”
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~bitz/Bitz_and_Roe_2004.pdf
#309 Ron Taylor,
I think NSIDC are quite right in suggesting that correlation, and their data is accurate enough to be confident in it given the yearly variance.
I just think 25:1 implies virtually a “dead cert”, and as we’re now in unknown territory in the Arctic I’m not sure anything on a year to year basis is yet a virtual certainty (see my observation re perennial ice area in post 302) . In the satellite observations, a new record minima in one year is not followed by a new record. There’s no certainty that “rule” will hold, but equally, there’s no certainty it will not!
Bear in mind we’re only just into June, and NSIDC cautioned this last year:
By the way I should again stress, I’m just an amateur.
2 June 2008 at 3:37 PM
Bart Verheggen wrote: “I do wonder why coal in combination with CCS should be avoided.”
Principally because no such thing as commercially applicable CCS technology exists nor is it likely to exist within the time frame during which we need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions. CCS — “clean coal” — is nothing but coal industry propaganda. There is no such thing.
Also, coal mining itself is an environmental disaster, even before a crumb of coal is actually burned.
2 June 2008 at 3:45 PM
When CCS can be demonstrated to be both effective and economical, then I won’t oppose using coal-fired power generation. But as yet, it hasn’t even been demonstrated, let alone shown to be possible on a large scale with enough efficiency and economy to be workable. So at present, I regard discussion of CCS as sharing something in common with Dyson’s “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees”: it doesn’t exist, we don’t know when (or even if) it will exist, and using the possibility to rationalize building more coal-fired plants is folly.
There are technologies that do already exist. Both wind and solar actually work, and once in operation they’re carbon-neutral — no capture or sequestration is necessary. The reason to switch to these already-existing renewable energy technologies is to prevent exactly the human misery and death which looms large in the future as population and consumption grow and climate destabilizes. The “free market” has demonstrated that it lacks the ethics and the foresight to invest in these technologies with anything close to the scale necessary for a healthy planet and a healthy human population.
Capitalism is a fine system for building industries which satisfy consumer desires, but only for a profit; the essence of capitalism is the love of money. But only the law prevents capitalists from doing so at the cost of terrible human misery; if they can make more money exploiting people than they can providing good quality of life, they won’t hesitate to do so. Essential survival needs cannot be left in the hands of capitalists.
I’m sure I’ll be roundly demonized for saying so. But before you compose a vitriolic response, remember there’s a well-known reference for my opinion; a very ancient document which states that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” If you disagree, take it up with the author.
2 June 2008 at 7:01 PM
Moderation delays…is everybody moderated here for many hours? Very hard to carry on like that, and it makes me sound non-responsive which I certainly am NOT.
Ray:
add the fact that we know natural ghg emissions will kick in, swamp the anthropogenic emissions and rip away whatever control we could exercise, then we have a very strong case for very vigorous action NOW …
I’m missing something here - is the natural CO2 swamping effect you are talking about outside of what is projected by the most recent IPCC scenarios?
In terms of unbounded risks I think we agree on the general approach (well, perhaps not if you agree with Stern on discounting), but we most certainly disagree about the likelihood of super costly high temperature scenarios. Simply put if I believed, for example, that there was a 20% or greater chance of GW caused global catastrophe by 2100 then I’d agree we should be mitigating the heck out of things almost regardless of the cost. But I believe IPCC’s projections are realistic and should be our guide to the likely scenarios, and that leads me to agree with most mainstream economists that optimal outcome is from a low to moderate mitigation effort.
JC - good question about tolerance for Co2 and SL rise: I also replied over at my blog where the spirited debate is also raging:
In terms of tolerance of CO2 and Sea Level rises my answer is basically that I’m very tolerant of the current situation (ie likely temperature incrase of about 3 degrees in next 100 years and sea level rise of this much per year: | or about 3 or 4 feet in the next century. There will be plenty of time to adjust to these tiny numbers. Catastrophe is already *here* in Africa where millions die annually from AIDS, Malaria, Intestinal disease. I’d fix that *first*, then talk about foregoing extra trillions *today* to delay the 3 degree rise from year 2100 to year 2101.
I see no catastrophes looming (based on even the highest IPCC projections for Temp and Sea Level rises). I do agree that if Greenland melts we could be in for some major shit, but this appears very unlikely and I’d certainly want far more data before we start acting based on that assumption.
I should note that I realize my interpretations here could be very wrong. If Stern’s approach is right, most economists are wrong and so am I - we should be mitigating the heck out of things effective ASAP. Also, if Hansen’s suggestions that catastrophic melting is likely just around the corner are correct then I’m very wrong (along with most climate scientists).
But I’m a guy that accepts mainstream climate science *and* mainstream economic science, which together suggest a simple and cost effective approach:
Moderate efforts at C02 mitigation with a powerful focus on potential low cost solutions.
2 June 2008 at 7:13 PM
Uli - I’m trying to figure out what you mean. By year 3000 (!) did you mean year 2100? Your example seems very contrived to me but I’m assuming you are trying to demonstrate that waiting means we’ll have to mitigate at a much greater rate than if we start now? That is obviously true, but mitigation in the future is likely (almost certainly) going to be far, far cheaper. This was a key part of Dyson’s point (missed here by most). Not that magic trees are in the pipeline, but that technology … gets cheaper by the minute. It is wonderfully ironic how much enthusiasm there is for supercomputer climate modelling while at the same time such aversion for the idea that supercomputer mitigation solutions are coming soon to a planet near us all.
2 June 2008 at 8:04 PM
> mitigation in the future is likely (almost certainly)
> going to be far, far cheaper
Passenger pigeon
Carolina parakeet
American Chestnut
Water pollution: http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/society/pic5.gif
Lead
Mercury
http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/centralized_brochure.pdf
It’s hard to find a current or historical problem for which it was actually cheaper to even begin to address problems later compared to what it would have cost to take the obvious precautions early on.
Horse manure on city streets — there’s one. Rather than invent the steam-powered pooper scooper, cities simply waited for the invention of the automobile to displace the automobiles.
Now should we just wait for the vat-grown PETA Porkchop to displace hog farms and their nasty sludge ponds?
Any others? Someone must have a list somewhere pointing out the successes, I suppose.
2 June 2008 at 8:18 PM
Joe, the IPCC uses 3 degrees per doubling of CO2. This is the most probable value–not the extreme. Depending on the data used, the value could be as high as 4.5 or even 6 degrees per doubling. Moreover, while the IPCC scenarios do look at solubility of CO2 in the oceans (and so, presumably outgassing), they don’t look at outgassing of permafrost or methane clathrates for the simple reason that we don’t know how much this will contribute.
The costs if we see 6 degrees of warming are dire indeed–as outlined by Hank, so with even 1-5% probability, they dominate the risk. So until we have better data, we had better keep things under control.
2 June 2008 at 9:47 PM
Joe, as an addition to Ray Ladbury
the word “catastrophic” in this subject (which usually carries around a more accusing tone than a scientific one) is generally very ill-defined and subjective, and there is no widespread agreement between scientists (and other fields like economists) if a doubling or a tripling or a quadrupling of CO2 counts as “catastrophic.” What is certainly scientifically supportable, is that such as change would swamp any natural variations in Holocene-like conditions, produce widespread impacts as well as ecological and economic loss. Is a complete loss of seasonal arctic sea ice, or the displacement of thousands or millions of people or coastal and island flooding catastrophic? Personally, I really don’t care what you call it, but I don’t want it, and I especially don’t want it on timescales which are too short for evolutionary adaptation (like decades).
It’s not trivial to quantify the impacts of global warming, and you wouldn’t have a complete agreement on their significance or what to do about it even if we had a perfect scientific understanding of what they would be. We don’t even have a universal way of quantifying the significance of the loss of an ecosystem from an economics perspective. But the fact is that we know a 3 C warming or more will be very significant by any reasonable standard, and we cannot rule out low probability-high consequence events which some might call abrupt climate change or tipping points. The IPCC WG2 is the best assessment on this, and I think Mark Lynas’ book “Six Degrees” is probably the best book that is friendly reading.
2 June 2008 at 9:47 PM
Re 318 - Tamino,
…amen, and thanks for the clarity.
2 June 2008 at 10:05 PM
Re Joseph Hunkins @319: “But I believe IPCC’s projections are realistic and should be our guide to the likely scenarios”
Fine, but be sure to take into account the IPCC’s explicit caveat that it assumed no increase in the rate of melting of the Greenland ice cap, yet such an increase is exactly what is being observed. And be sure to also take into account an actual rate of Arctic sea ice melt that makes a mockery of original projections. And actual observed rates of methane emissions from thawing permafrost, which were not included in the IPCC projections.
In other words, be sure to take into account that some of the IPCC’s projections were wrong, and that the errors were not in our favour.
2 June 2008 at 10:07 PM
Jim Cripwell Says:
1 June 2008 at 11:00 AM
“pete best writes “Surely the ice is thinner and younger this year so it more than likely. Is this going to be a new record year?” This is a good question, and I am not sure what the answer is. In a very crude way, there are two types of ice; what I call “annual ice”, and ice that is over one year old. Each year, about 9 million sq kms of open water turn to ice during the “winter”, and the about the same amount melts every “summer”. This is “annual ice”, and by definition, it is always less than one year old.”
And at the start of this winter there was only 2 million sq km of old ice left.
“I understand it’s thickness is solely dependent on how long and how cold the “winter” was. This season, the “winter” was longer and colder than average in the Canadian part of the Arctic.”
But not in other parts!
“In fact, the ice surface returned far more rapidly that it disappeared.”
After starting about a month later than usual, and then the average rate of disappearance during the month of April was 6,000 square kilometers per day faster than last April.
“So, one would not necessarily expect a rapid melt in places like Hudson Bay, and the North West Passage. However, the behaviour of ice that is more than one year old, I know very little about.”
Well a lot of it left the Arctic during the winter via the Fram St:
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/App/WsvPageDsp.cfm?Lang=eng&lnid=43&ScndLvl=no&ID=11892
As I pointed out a couple of months ago the dramatic breakup of multi year ice in the Beaufort sea will have significant impact for ice loss this summer and it’s certainly looking that way in the movie.
2 June 2008 at 10:35 PM
Conservative political analyst George F. Will opposes the cap-and-trade proposal being considered by the U.S. Congress, calling it
“An unprecedentedly radical government grab for control of the American economy…cloaked in reassuring rhetoric about the government merely creating a market, but government actually would create a scarcity so government could sell what it has made scarce.”
He suggests, instead, a straightforward tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/241492
I’m curious to know what the economists think of this - is an obvious tax better for the environment and/or economy than a “hidden” tax?
2 June 2008 at 10:57 PM
#318. I think CCS is somewhat further advanced than “it doesn’t exist, we don’t know when (or even if) it will exist”. All the technologies used in CCS (capture from stack, CO2 separation and underground storage - at least in depleted gas fields) already exist albeit built for other purposes. The Otway project is going and Gorgon will be full commercial scale. I think it is a technology that is well worth the research.
“using the possibility to rationalize building more coal-fired plants is folly.”
On this we agree. Our government has banned state-owned companies from starting any thermal project UNLESS there is complete CCS, putting the onus of proof back on them.
3 June 2008 at 1:05 AM
Chris: A good point that “catastrophe” is too vague/charged a term, though I use it a lot because my beef is with *characterizations* of IPCC rather than the data itself, which I feel was very responsibly reported.
Ray (and Jim). Yes, I agree that 3 is the most probable temp increase but that higher is possible. I also think (without much to back it up) that the 1-5% estimate of a higher temp likelihood is reasonable.
Now some research is needed because I was under the impression that at least some of Nordhaus’ projections using the DICE model included those unlikely high temp conditions. If we had a very high chance of 6 degrees we should spend much more now than if we have a low chance, and I think 1-5% is a low chance.
Hank I think you’ve raised a great question but not answered it with that list. *At what point* is intervention optimal? Clearly we should not pull out all the stops today to save the American Robin from extinction, since it’s not facing trouble. Spotted owls here in Oregon may get a 400 million recovering plan soon and it would be weak for me to suggest that’s cheaper than if we’d done better 20 years back when we knew things were problematic with the species. Again, we face the *real* questions of how much, on what, and when. Nordhaus appears to have an *excellent* approach to making that decision. Let’s use it.
3 June 2008 at 2:03 AM
re: #327
Carbon taxes are certainly simpler, but as usual, the devil is in the details. I reiterate what I said in #90, but having read Nordhaus’ book, I have more details.
1 gallon gas ~ 20 lbs of CO2
1 ton CO2 ~~ 100 gallons of gas or diesel
$100 per ton carbon = $27.2 / ton CO2 = $.27/gallon
p.91 of Nordhaus gives Carbon prices (in 2005 US$)for different policies
His “optimal” policy gives:
2005. 2015. 2025. 2035. 2045. 2055. 2065… 2075… 2085… 2095… 2105…
27.28 41.90 53.39 66.49 81.31 98.01 116.78 137.82 161.37 187.68 217.02 $/Ton Carbon
$0.07 $0.11 $0.14 $0.18 $0.22 $0.26 $0.32 .$0.37 .$0.44 .$0.51 .$0.59 $ tax/gallon
It is completely unclear to me how a carbon tax of that size can have much noticeable effect any time soon, given that it’s totally dwarfed by Oil price jiggles. That’s not to argue against it - I’d rather we keep the money, but I do observe that *wishing for a carbon tax* is no apriori wish to actually do anything meaningful, because it depends on the numbers. Stern’s numbers start at $249 ($.59/gal) and end at $940 ($2.54/gal) … which is still lower than most European countries, but at least might actually get noticed.
It is instructive to read Nordhaus with a copy of Kharecha & Hansen at hand for comparison.
If all one does is a carbon tax, given that Oil+Gas prices are likely to go up anyway, I think this is a recipe to shift to more coal for electricity and synfuels…
Again, I simply do not understand how, simultaneously:
a) More than a $0.11/gallon in 2015 would be nonoptimally high
b) But a $1 price rise now [and probably more to come from Peak Oil] is irrelevant.
Again, I beg any economist (or anyone who says they trust these results) for enlightenment.
3 June 2008 at 6:12 AM
#311- Douglas Wise “However, notably absent from any discussions of possible solutions has been any acknowledgement of our burgeoning population growth, growth which, sooner or later, will have to reverse if we are to hold out any hope of saving the planet.”
Well, this site is not primarily about solutions, but I don’t think you can have been following very closely if you have not seen population growth discussed. The proportional rate of growth has halved in the last 40 years, and since the late 1990s growth has actually been slightly sublinear. Moreover, we know how to accelerate the trend toward zero or negative growth: move people into cities (we couldn’t stop this if we wanted), educate girls, improve access to contraception.
“Tamino, let’s not get off on the wrong foot. I would genuinely value your opinion as to whether you think that , were you in a position to implement all of the policies that you could wish for, you could prevent dangerous climate change while giving time for global population to level off naturally. I would be delighted with a convincing and affirmative answer. If you don’t think such a benign outcome is possible, then we are going to have to address some very unsavoury demographic solutions.”
What “very unsavoury demographic solutions” are you thinking of. Mass murder? Compulsory sterilisation?
3 June 2008 at 6:21 AM
“But I’m a guy that accepts mainstream climate science *and* mainstream economic science”
Whether “mainstream economic science” exists is a moot point. There simply is not the kind of consensus among relevant experts about economics as there is about climate science.
“It is wonderfully ironic how much enthusiasm there is for supercomputer climate modelling while at the same time such aversion for the idea that supercomputer mitigation solutions are coming soon to a planet near us all.”
Not really: the site is run by climate modellers, so they know climate modelling works, and they know how to continue improving it. Relying on pie-in-the-sky “supercomputer mitigation solutions” is merely foolish.
3 June 2008 at 9:19 AM
I am new to this large site. Can you help me find what I am looking for? Rather than the science, I am interested in who cares? - meaning, is there a purely political reason for highlighting this issue? Is some lofty person or group with a philosophical view have a reason to emphasize the issue of climate change? Is something beyond science propelling the issue? Is there a puppet master guiding the editors of textbooks for all levels of education? It appears to me that no serious politician dares to question what children have been taught from the earliest grades. What is really behind this amazing phenomenon of promoting climate change politics?
Jonathan Dyrud
[Response: It’s a fair cop, we are all paid up members of the climatati - a secret society formed in Bavaria in the depths of the Little Ice Age, dedicated to subverting all authority. Or you are very confused. Take your pick. (PS. This site is just about the science. You might be happier elsewhere). - gavin]
3 June 2008 at 9:51 AM
Joe, I’ve been seening your ‘joeduck’ postings in many places around the net for a long time. You’ve got opinions. Everyone’s entitled to their own. If you have facts on the question, I’d be interested.
“If you have a choice between a hypothetical situation and a real one, choose the real one.” — Joan Baez
3 June 2008 at 9:58 AM
re #331 Nick Gotts apparently knows how to accelerate the trend towards zero or negative population growth but the supposed efficacy of the methods he suggests have been subject to recent academic challenge. However, I have no real wish to get into a debate over this issue because it is off topic.
What I would like to know, in the view of the technically expert contributors to this site, is whether dangerous global warming can be averted through the use of existing technology, provided that an appropriate global consensus could be obtained to expedite deployment of the proposed solutions. If so, is this compatible with a global population peaking at, say, 9 billion in 2050? If not, I previously suggested that there would have to be consideration of “very unsavouy demographic solutions”.
Nick asked if I were contemplating mass murder. I would not rule it out if the choice were between that and all going down in the sinking ship together and taking down most other species with us. However, even if technology can’t provide the fix we all desire for all 9 billion of the 2050 population, there are other possible solutions that should obviously be considered before mass murder (which I interpret to mean war).
Homo sapiens is but one of many species of mammal. If any other species were to temporarily escape the normally controlling agencies of predation, disease or food supply, wildlife managers would intervene to prevent resource degradation which would otherwise lead to a lower future carrying capacity for the species in question or to a reduction in biodiversity. Homo sapiens has escaped normal controls by exploitation of fossil fuels. Are we going to behave as any other species would and carry on using what we can till it has all gone or, because we are unique in having reflexive consciousness, do we have the capacity to escape going over the precipice just in time? It is a moot point and one that probably can’t be answered except in the future.
At the moment, all I am trying to find out is whether we are just in time if we could overcome some of our possibly hard wired behaviours and cooperate. In other words, is there a satisfactory technical fix if we can summon the will to use it?
3 June 2008 at 10:42 AM
335: Douglas Wise “Nick Gotts apparently knows how to accelerate the trend towards zero or negative population growth but the supposed efficacy of the methods he suggests have been subject to recent academic challenge.”
Such an assertion is all the better for some actual references; and since you brought up population, and are continuing to talk about it, perhaps you could provide some.
“At the moment, all I am trying to find out is whether we are just in time if we could overcome some of our possibly hard wired behaviours and cooperate.”
Anyone who pretends to know whether it is too late is ignoring the considerable remaining uncertainties about climate sensitivity, availability of fossil fuels, possible changes in solar output or large volcanic eruptions, etc. If you decide it’s time to start the mass-murder, make sure you target it appropriately, at the richest areas of North America and western Europe, since that’s where the greatest concentrations of greenhouse gases are still coming from.
3 June 2008 at 12:06 PM
Re # 330 John Mashey
Point of clarification: George Will proposed (if I read him correctly and take him at his word) a tax on the carbon content of the fuel - not on the price of the fuel. So, it should be independent of the price of a barrel of oil. Yes?
To get back to my original question, there is little doubt that a direct tax is anathema to most politicians. And, based on my economically-challenged way of looking at these issues, if a carbon tax were to be compensated by a reduction in some other tax (as Will suggests), the whole thing would be revenue neutral, and there would little incentive to take the carbon tax revenue out of the general fund and use it to promote alternative fuels, emission-reducing technologies, etc. I have to wonder if these aren’t the very reasons George Will favors a direct carbon tax - nothing will change.
3 June 2008 at 12:08 PM
Hi Douglas and Nick, I think you should both give each other the benefit of the doubt–and indeed every other poster–that they are not in favor of mass murder. There is no need to take antagonistic positions. We have all accepted that society is in the soup unless we take serious action and that if we screw up the actions we take, we will equally be in the soup. We also agree that certain actions will make things worse, while others will ameliorate the situation–whether enough to avoid disaster we cannot know yet.
I think Douglas feels frustrated with the slow progress toward finding solutions (as are we all) and worried that by the time action is agreed upon we may find we are too late. However, I think it is safe to say that since we do not yet have a generally agreed upon technological or economic fix, we are in a position of trying to buy time however we can until such a fix or fixes can be found.
3 June 2008 at 1:06 PM
Re: #335 (Douglas Wise)
Of course I don’t know the answer, but I’ll offer an opinion. I’d say no, we can’t avoid dangerous climate change — but yes, we can avoid disastrous climate change. It will require two things. First, we have to make massive investment in renewable energy, including both the deployment of existing tech (wind, solar, etc.) and R&D, while phasing out (rapidly) fossil-fuel energy. Absolutely no more coal-fired plants until CCS is proven.
Second, we have to make actual sacrifices. The 3-car family has to become a 2-car or 1-car family, the Ford F350 pickup truck has to become a Prius, the Hummer should simply be banned. No more incandescent light bulbs, period. Leaving electronic devices on “standby” all night long while everyone’s asleep must be forbidden. Animal husbandry must be reduced, and meat should probably be rationed. Efficiency and conservation should be the rule of law, not the recommendation of environmental activists. I’m sure this sounds unpleasant, and it is, but it’s far better than the alternative. We can pay now, or we can pay later, and the cost later is all too likely to involve that mass murder/warfare which we all shudder to imagine.
It’s nearly impossible to avoid future CO2 concentrations reaching 440-450 ppm, but we can limit it there if we act *now*, not later. If levels soar to 550 ppm or higher, we’re beyond dangerous and into “totally screwed.”
Finally: the forces of “free-market capitalism” which seek to obstruct all the above must be punished. Slapped down hard. The forces of “free-market capitalism” which seek to profit from development and deployment of the renewable technology that will help, must be rewarded. Lavishly.
3 June 2008 at 1:25 PM
re #336. We all need hope for the future of our offspring. Without it, the strategy of many will be to “eat, drink and be merry”.
3 June 2008 at 2:27 PM
re #339. Tamino, thank you. I greatly appreciate your answer. It doesn’t fill me with the hope I had wished for but, nevertheless, doesn’t totally extinguish it. I appreciate that you acknowledge that none of wants mass murder/warfare and that not all “free market capitalism” is necessarily malign
3 June 2008 at 2:53 PM
re: #337 Chuck Booth
Carbon taxes are indeed taxes on the carbon content, not on the price of the fuel, they are like the excise tax, not a sales tax.
Look again at Nordhaus’ by-year imputed $/gallon taxes. Those might be noticeable to businesses that use a lot of fuel, but they’re in the noise for a long time compared with the rises in prices at the pump. Assume someone drives 10,000 miles/year @ 25 mpg, so uses 400 gallons/year. In 2015, the tax would cost them $44. I’m not sure that’s enough to induce much behavioral change.
Again, as best as I can tell [and I’ve been looking at the GAMS code from his website], Nordhaus’s models say:
(a) The economically optimal carbon tax is as shown in #330; more than $.11 in 2015 would hurt the economy.
(b) BUT, somehow, large oil price increases have *zero* effect on the economy in the next few years. There’s one giant pot for all fossil fuels, and no resource exhaustion limits / Hoteling effects happen any time soon.
“I have to wonder if these aren’t the very reasons George Will favors a direct carbon tax - nothing will change.”
That is certainly plausible, which is what I was trying to say in:
“*wishing for a carbon tax* is no apriori wish to actually do anything meaningful”,
as it has been interesting to see certain people espousing carbon taxes [but not high enough to have much effect soon], and perhaps guessing that the political difficulties end up stop them from happening at all. This can be an effective tactic, i.e., the misdirection argument. I am *not* claiming Nordhaus is doing this.
3 June 2008 at 3:25 PM
Fortunately politics just doesn’t work like that and therefore neither meat nor cars will be rationed and conservation won’t become the rule of law. Politicians will do something, if its benefit is obvious and visible. Nuclear energy was one of those things. It was visible and gave the impression of a technological advantage that nobody wanted to miss out on. You could sell it to the public as a leap forward into a better future. Rationing meat will not save the planet but it does significantly cut into our daily lives and our freedom. Surely we can survive eating less meat. We can also survive not going on holiday, not having pets, not eating rice, not heating our homes in fall and spring (what are blankets for?) and not watching television. But no politician will ever come up with an according law because all of that has very little effect. And the argument, that many small things can positively add up to big one is true for cutting into our personal freedom as well. Politicians should focus on the big stuff: promote renewable energy but please don’t steal my hambuger for a millionth of a millimeter in sea-level rise.
3 June 2008 at 4:00 PM
re: #339 tamino
Yes, but many people have trouble with long-term thinking. Maybe it would help to realize that if we *don’t* do these things, the USA economy won’t be anything like what they’re used to, *much sooner*.
I summarize (& add a few):
C = climate
E = economy
1. C E avoidance of waste
2. C E efficiency
3. C E build renewables as fast as possible
4. C E avoid throwing away money on “stranded assets” (vehicles + infrastructure)
5. C E carefully manage oil+gas to allow a shallower downslope post-Peak
6. C E change utility rules to encourage efficiency & renewables
7. C - manage un-CCSed coal down as fast as possible **
8. C E manage a disciplined R&D & deployment program, not magic.
9. C E think real hard about the nature of the US military
Item 1: are often actions that can betaken with no investment, on short notice.
Item 2: have big payoffs, but sometimes take a while, due to installed base issues.
item 3: will take a long time, so better be doing it now.
Item 4: buy and build nothing whose natural economic life exceeds the life dictated by rising prices of oil+gas. I.e., as of today, GM seems no logjner committed to Hummers. Good move. There are still plenty on the lots.
Item 5: from past oil shocks, the slope of the supply curve matters, and steep supply drops are really rough, because substitution takes a while. We are way better off economically if, for example, we leave ANWR as a (small) piggy-bank for some future generation. Oil+gas have to increasingly be treated as capital to be *invested*.
Item 6: this is one of the biggest wins there is. Incent utilities (as CA does) to make money via efficiency, not just more megawatts. CA has managed to keep electricity/capita flat for ~30 years, while USA average has gone up 40-50%. If everybody had done, there would have been a lot less coal plants. As can be seen in US per capita energy use by state, states vary tremendously, and it’s isn’t just by climate. Long-term policies matter. For good ideas, the hero in CA is Art Rosenfeld.
Item 7: ** coal is the big differentiator between climate (and environment in general) and economics. I grew up in Western PA (i.e., edge of coal country), used to work for the US Bureau of Mines, and if someone wants to learn more about the management style and environmental consciousness of this industry, I recommend Jeff Goodell’s “Big Coal”.
Item 8: We need properly-crafted, “progressive-commitment” R&D programs.
item 9: For the same resource expenditure, there is some tradeoff between building {windmills, solar thermal, etc} and building {tanks, airplanes, and coal-to-liquid synfuel plants}.
Anyway, I’d claim that “climate vs economy” is a mis-direction argument, of which most seems to come from coal people, unsurprisingly.
3 June 2008 at 4:17 PM
Off topic. For those interested there is an NSDIC update of the situation with respect to arctic sea ice.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html
3 June 2008 at 5:33 PM
Yes, Jim, I’m sure many of us have been watching the NSDIC plots with baited breath. That the current trend has almost caught up with last year’s trend since mid-May is the reason most of us did not take much comfort in this past winter’s ‘record’ refreeze. We may not exceed 2007 this year, but it probably won’t be far off.
3 June 2008 at 7:20 PM
#299 Geoff Sherrington, how in the world did you read my statement in post #298 to conclude that I was advocating taking “the money from efficient power stations, (to)give the money to the poor so they can inefficiently burn more fuel?” I was advocating redirecting resources from wasteful and low yield uses like cold war weapons to investments in improvements in energy use efficiency and alternative carbon neutral energy sources.
3 June 2008 at 9:04 PM
Re 300
“For many species, sunlight is not that important. Warmth combined with enough moisture is more important.”
But that does not explain why wheat fields limited by a short growth season and lack of hot sunshine should yield 50% more grain than those who are not. It makes no sense at all.
3 June 2008 at 9:08 PM
Re 344 - John, you have pretty well nailed it as far as I am concerned. I especially appreciate your take on drilling ANWR. I have gone from telling friends “We shouldn’t drill ANWR” to, “Yes, we will have to drill ANWR, but I hope we don’t do so until after we have improved efficiency, since we would just waste it if we drilled now.”
I think we will desperately need it in the future and will be glad it is still there.
3 June 2008 at 9:35 PM
Tamino #339. Your contributions in statistics and allied areas have been so well-reasoned, well-presented, and to the point that it is very disheartening to have to dissent with your proposals for public policy. I’m having great trouble characterizing them without ad hom adjectives, so I’ll just say that their likelihood of success is nearly equal to their grounding in logic and judgment. About zero, in each case, to several decimal places. Rationing meat and banning Hummers, gimme a break.
Surely all this blog’s readers understand that such policies are not the only way to control AGW. Even more surely, any such policies would be fought to the death (more or less literally, given the consequences) by the right and most of the center. As noted above, even George Will, hardly a lefty, is willing to talk about a carbon tax. (BTW, see carbontax.org for many cogent reasons why it beats cap and trade.) Reducing national and world economic inequality is a separable problem, with far less dire feedback loops. Very simple question: What are the IPCC reports about, CO2 or Hummer counts? The CO2 is the first-order problem, the Hummers a side issue. Get the right policy, and the Hummer count will take care of itself.
I don’t mean to disagree with the need for some sacrifice, but a sensible CO2 policy will have many benefits as well. Let’s not throw them away by taking our eye off the main issue.
3 June 2008 at 11:06 PM
Per, day length more than sun angle affects available energy for photosynthesis during wheat’s growing season (roughly 100-120 days).
4 June 2008 at 1:20 AM
Re # 322 Ray Ladbury
Miscellaneous. I did a CO2 audit of the Company because we did audits on any material that could be potentially harmful and we knew the way the Mauna Loa data were heading. We also studied radon intensively, plus the materials used to proof logs against insects , sulphur dioxide from smelting and so on. Another Corporation made a phytometer around a huge tree to study many effects like transpiration - and this was around 1982, before academics were doing anything similar. Contrary to some opinions expressed above, Corporations often lead the pack in remediation of emerging problems, so the public hardly hears of some that are nipped in the bud. If it adds to the cost of products, then people whine. That’s gratitude.
So please don’t treat readers as if they were dolts. Dolts don’t get invited half way round the world to give key seminar papers. Don’t be like Gavin who wrote for me “Possibly you did not read these papers….” Heck I didn’t. Maybe long before he did.
For what it’s worth, my personal view (and we used to own three large coal mines) is that CCS will not be a significant factor for decades, if ever.
You wrote above
“Joe, the IPCC uses 3 degrees per doubling of CO2. This is the most probable value–not the extreme. Depending on the data used, the value could be as high as 4.5 or even 6 degrees per doubling. Moreover, while the IPCC scenarios do look at solubility of CO2 in the oceans (and so, presumably outgassing), they don’t look at outgassing of permafrost or methane clathrates for the simple reason that we don’t know how much this will contribute.
The costs if we see 6 degrees of warming are dire indeed–as outlined by Hank, so with even 1-5% probability, they dominate the risk. So until we have better data, we had better keep things under control.”
This is where we part company. Settled science again? You should be lambasting those who made the silly talk about settled science that was so divisive and untrue.
You have no proof of a probable sensitivity value, just a concurrence of thought among colleagues of like mind. You report sensitivity as a settled science when about half the posts on Realclimate are disputing that the science is settled. If it is settled, why do you stay in business? Most of my senior colleagues and I who study these matters are still awaiting a definitive derivation of the sensitivity, indeed even whether CO2 has much to do with anything. As scientists and engineers, we hope for the numbers to come out in solid form soon, because then correctional measures can be planned and executed as needed by those able to do it well. But the central plank of AGW, that CO2 is the main culprit, simply does not wash yet. Even the current talk of adjustments to SST, which I have looked at for years, has the capacity to (a) severely alter estimates of past century temperature change and (b) to therefore throw back in doubt those hindcast models currently thought to perform well.
This is not to say that any of us deny that CO2 is still a candidate for climate equations. It’s elemantary that a heating effect exists in a pure, primary sense, but it’s not nearly so clear in Nature. The standard of proof does not meet the bar and it annoys hell out of us that otherwise sane people say “close all coal plants” and the like (while continuing to luxuriate in their output).
Such cures are more severe than the illness. By all means close all coal and gas plants if your wish is to kill millions of people in quick time.
4 June 2008 at 1:59 AM
#345/346, Jim n’ Jim.
The winter maxima is largely set outside the Arctic Ocean Basin itself, as the Arctic Ocean is ice covered before the maxima is reached. In that sense a record maxima is largely irrelevant, ice conditions inside the Arctic Basin are more important for the summer minima.
Also for any interested lurkers.
I cannot recommend the following too strongly:
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/satellite/index_e.html
Environment Canada’s satellite images.
Scroll down to HRPT (NOAA Polar Orbiting).
For the Arctic Ocean: Northern Canada and Arctic Ocean, Canadian Arctic Composite, and Northern Nunavut, are the ones to follow. Notably the Nunavut images.
For the NW Passage and Baffin Bay: Baffin Island / Qikiqtaaluk. Although I’ve not been following that closely as my key interest is in the basin and the fate of the perennial ice. (There’s much broken ice at the Baffin Bay end of the NW Passage.)
By this time of year the IR is of virtually no use for the ice as there’s so much low level haze (water vapour). To see the ice use the visible images, and use the IR to sort to out where cloud/vapour is obscuring the ice itself (it can be hard to see what’s ice and what’s cloud).
Those images change rapidly so you’ll need to keep popping back there if the current image doesn’t show much.
4 June 2008 at 5:12 AM
re #336 Nick Gotts
I apologise for having failed to give the source for my comment suggesting that there was not unanimity over your suggestions for managing population decline. I was thinking of the work of Virginia Abernethy and her questioning of the orthodox view of Demographic Transition. I have also been much persuaded by the writings of Albert Bartlett. In the unlikely event that you are unfamiliar with their work, Wikipedia will give you a steer if you want to follow up.
You will be glad to know that I have no immediate plans to initiate mass murder. However, as a veterinarian, I feel that I ought to point out that if I were to leave animals in my care to starve to death rather than to slaughter them humanely (were they the only options available to me) I would be prosecuted on welfare grounds.
4 June 2008 at 6:03 AM
#350 Ric Merritt,
I agree, not just Tamino, but many others for whom I have the greatest respect leave me thoroughly unconvinced in the arena of solutions. I have read the arguments but keep coming back into the “no way out” camp (at the most basic level - everyone I know still loves flying/driving/patio heaters etc etc). We’ll shortly see whether the multifarious proposals and the existing environmental protections (e.g. low sulphur fuels) survive the economic constriction of what increasingly seems to be the onset of Peak Oil. I think they will not, in the fight against falling EROEI it seems almost inevitable that we’ll see our daliance with fighting GW/pollution fall away in the face of more pressing concerns. As for a 50% increase in agricultural output by 2030 as demanded by the UN, er, yes, well…
I’ll shut up now and get back out of the way of those who see solutions, best of luck to you all.
4 June 2008 at 6:22 AM
Geoff Sherrington writes:
“Half the posts on RealClimate” don’t prove anything at all. The opinion of professional climate scientists does.
Because defining climate sensitivity isn’t all that climate scientists do?
It does among those with a clue.
4 June 2008 at 6:23 AM
Geoff Sherrington writes:
Except that no one is proposing anything of the sort. What was proposed was a moratorium on new coal plants. Go back and read it again.
4 June 2008 at 6:29 AM
In #353 Cobblyworlds writes “The winter maxima is largely set outside the Arctic Ocean Basin itself, as the Arctic Ocean is ice covered before the maxima is reached. In that sense a record maxima is largely irrelevant, ice conditions inside the Arctic Basin are more important for the summer minima.” I am trying to understand what effect “annual” ice has on the summer minimum. Please note I am talking the ice that is, by definition, always less than one year old. I have noted before that my instinct tells me that the thickness (or amount) of this ice must be almost entirely caused by the cold conditions during the one winter when it forms. Now there is clearly “annual” ice in the Arctic basin, and how much there is, from my instincts, depends on the length and the cold of the winter. These winter conditions also, presumably, affect how much area the annual ice covers outside the Arctic basin. So, in this sense, the two effects may be correlated. I just dont know.
4 June 2008 at 6:46 AM
Re# 352 Geoff wrote “It’s elemantary that a heating effect exists in a pure, primary sense, but it’s not nearly so clear in Nature.” Exactly right Geoff! You nailed it! Carbon dioxide is just not so clear (transparent) in certain key regions of the infrared part of Nature’s electromagnetic spectrum. That,in fact,is the heart of the problem, recognized long before our current age of exquisitely sensitive analytical instruments. It is so nice to agree on things. Cheers!
4 June 2008 at 8:11 AM
Re #354 Douglas Wise: Douglas, I’m interested in your choice of authorities on population. Alfred Bartlett is an emeritus professor of physics. This does not in itself mean he has nothing useful to say on population, but he appears to ignore the fact that population has not been growing exponentially: up to around 40 years ago it had been growing super-exponentially at least since the Black Death; since then, growth has been subexponential. As has been discussed on this site, Malthus, whom Bartlett follows, was simply wrong in thinking that people have as many children as they can feed. Abernethy is an even more interesting choice. She describes herself as an “ethnic separatist”, and is a convinced opponent of immigration (to the USA), and of food aid. Her main claim is that fertility follows perceived economic opportunity. There may be some truth in this - common sense suggests people will sometimes delay having children until they feel they can afford them - but it is in no way incompatible with the “demographic transition” (not that I think that is a particularly useful term), because:
(a) People’s assessment of what they can afford is highly context-dependent, they generally want their children to have at least the socio-economic status they do themselves, and it costs a lot more to raise an urban and/or educated child than a rural labourer. For a start, poor rural children will be earning their keep by the age of 7.
(b) People tend to copy role-models of higher social status than themselves, and in modern societies those in higher socio-economic strata tend to have fewer children, probably for the reasons set out in (a) (Brazilian soaps, which feature middle-class families with few children are said to have contributed to the drop in birth rate).
(c) There are reasons to expect women to want fewer children than their male partners: it is the woman who takes the risk of pregnancy and childbirth, and generally does most of the childrearing. Hence improving women’s status, to which educating girls makes the greatest contribution, should drive down birth-rates.
I’ll admit I haven’t read Abernethy’s work, but I can’t see how she can possibly argue against the fact that birth rates have come down in almost every country over the past 40 years, while people have got richer and more urban, and sexual equality has increased; and that the highest birthrates are in countries that are very poor, very sexually unequal, or both.
[edit - keep the rhetoric and ad homs down]
4 June 2008 at 9:31 AM
Geoff Sherrington, So you do not think CO2 is a greenhouse gas? Gee, I wonder where those extra 33 degrees C came from, then. Or perhaps you think that the greenhouse effect just magically stops at 288 ppmv? Or perhaps you think pixies are stealing the ice from alpine and polar glaciers?
Your senior colleagues and you must be getting awfully lonely. There is not a single professional scientific or engineering society that dissents from the proposition that the planet is warming or that humans are responsible–not one.
Geoff, a proposition becomes scientifically settled when those who oppose it stop publishing peer-reviewed research that supports their dissent, and when those few dissenting papers stop being cited in subsequent literature. When it comes to the role of CO2 in climate, we’re there. But, hey, Geoff, by all means, you are free to prove us wrong. All you have to do is come up with a physically reasonable model that does as good a job or better and that assigns a low sensitivity to CO2. Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Geoff, I am not a climate expert. It’s not my day job. I know enough about the science (because I’ve studied it) to see that it hangs together. I know that a lot of very smart people have also looked at the science and come to the same conclusion–and that unlike the denialists, they have a consistent story. I know that climate science has a 150 year history–it’s not in its infancy. I know that the science points to a credible threat.
Now risk analysis–that is my day job. I know that for a credible threat, you have to look at possible consequences and probability of occurrence for that threat. What I find here is that there is a whole lot more risk on the upside than the downside–no comfort in other words. The next step is to look for potential mitigations.
Now here, Geoff is where maybe you can help. I’m not a leftist. I believe in markets and democracy because we know we can make them work. And yet, when it comes to credible solutions for climate change–either technical or economical–I hear deafening silence. Oh, there’s plenty of noise, but it all seems to be directed toward denying sound science that the speakers don’t understand or downplaying risks that cannot be laid aside given the science.
So, Geoff, I ask you, is capitalism so inflexible that it cannot deal with the problem posed by climate change? Is the prospect really so frightening to capitalists that all they can do is deny the sound science and downplay the risks?
4 June 2008 at 9:53 AM
Dr. Sherrington writes:
“… Corporations often lead the pack in remediation of emerging problems, so the public hardly hears of some …”
Academic scientists have been working hard to make their research freely available to the public, with increasing success, though it’s taken more than a decade to become prominent.
Have any corporate scientists besides yourself been trying to make their research studies available for publication so it can begin to have a useful effect on public policy and be cited and relied on?
It seems a shame corporations don’t release their work like the studies you describe eventually to be published in science journals. Your anecdotes about your own company’s research work suggest there’s much else that should be published but hasn’t been.
The one large collection of corporate research recently turned over to the public, the decades of work collected in the tobacco papers, has been immediately productive of an enormous amount of followon science, citing that work. http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/
Yours could be similarly interesting if opened to other scientists.
4 June 2008 at 10:21 AM
Hi Nick,
I have not read Abernethy’s work, but I can help out a bit with insight into Al Bartlett. I’ve known Al Bartlett for over 30 years, during which time he has been preaching from the same text–that growth–population and/or economic–in a finite environment is simply not sustainable. One would think that this position would not be controversial, but it is.
My impression is that A^2B is fully aware of recent demographic trends. However he contends that it is unclear whether what we are seeing is a true turning point in demographics or merely a transition from one rate of exponential growth to another. Indeed, the experiences with birth control in India and China show how difficult efforts toward population control can be and the demographic problems they pose. Even with sub-exponential growth, it is hard to see how a world with 10 billion people is sustainable.
With respect to Bartlett, I can reassure you that while Malthusian in his thesis, he is not at all Malthusian in terms of the solutions he proposes. He is concerned with sustainability and how we get there–as am I, as are you, and Douglas and almost any other thinking individual who has their eyes open. We all know that the exponential model of population growth is flawed, but it is useful in that it highlights the fact that unregulated growth is not sustainable. We can certainly refine the model, but it won’t alter that basic conclusion.
4 June 2008 at 10:25 AM
#362 Hank,
Ouch!
4 June 2008 at 10:55 AM
RE #363 (Ray Ladbury)
“However he [Al Bartlett] contends that it is unclear whether what we are seeing is a true turning point in demographics or merely a transition from one rate of exponential growth to another.”
Then he’s wrong, since population growth appears not to have been exponential at any point in history. In addition, since a number of rich countries now have birthrates which will if continued lead to rapid population decline, there appear to be no grounds for thinking the growth rate will settle at any positive figure. Of course it might do, and I do not suggest any let-up in efforts to reduce fertility rates, even in countries where they are already below replacement level. What I do object to is the tired claim that population “is never discussed”, and talk of “very unsavoury demographic solutions”.
4 June 2008 at 12:16 PM
I wonder where the idea that nothing is being done about the environment in general and climate change in particular comes from. I can certainly say for my company (we build cars) that reducing fuel consumption has become the dominant factor in our development matrixes - more important than the next three factors put together. Across the entire lineup, we reduced consumption by 8% in the last decade and if you look at the consumption per car we actually sell (most of the volume is in small to midrange - luxury vehicles play a minor role) the reduction is in the 40% range. In terms of CO2 it means only 37% because we sell more diesel today but its still a significant reduction. The press doesn’t really see that. They prefer to blaim us for the rediculously low mileage of the top models which make up less than one percent of the cars we sell. Apart from that, the entire industry is focused on developing electric drivetrains. The guys calling the shots aren’t stupid and they don’t plan to close down the factories once oil hits the 500$/barrel mark - and most certainly they don’t believe they can survive on a handfull of high performance cars for the select few who can still afford personal transportation at these prices. It takes time, of course. The battery problem still is largely unsolved although progress is being made and its not so unsolved that it might turn out to be impossible. We’ve passed that point a couple of years ago. I see coal power plants as the thing that will probably resist much longer because coal will stay cheap. Getting away from coal will mainly be a politically driven process, rather than a technical issue. Alternatives do exist. Apart from the renewables, with all their issues concerning availability, there is nuclear and in the future there may be fusion. All politicians have to do, is focus on these rather than coal. At least here in germany, that’s kind of a catch 22. The green party went berserk against nuclear since the 70s and when they came to power in the late 90s, they immediately began phasing it out without having an alternative. Surely, the entire country is now covered in wind generators but its still not enough and we have to build new coal power plants - just for the benefit of calming the old, green “no nuke” reflexes. People still claim it can all be done with renewables only - but when it comes to actually doing it, they all seem to get stuck in a large minefield of technical IFs and BUTs and sooner or later they’ll have to turn towards nuclear again.
4 June 2008 at 1:35 PM
BPL (357) says, “…Except that no one is proposing anything of the sort. What was proposed was a moratorium on new coal plants. Go back and read it again.”
For the record, both Ike (278) and tamino(283), as pointed out by Douglas (301), do in fact effectively seem to want to stop coal in its tracks, though tamino covers his rear with the slippery *rapid* (his emphasis) shutting of current coal-fired plants, for a couple of examples.
4 June 2008 at 1:40 PM
Re CobblyWorlds @353: “The winter maxima is largely set outside the Arctic Ocean Basin itself, as t