Asymmetrical Information

Baloney.

I'm not swayed by a "lookback" of only 150 years. See the corrected version of the "hockey stick" here (scroll down):

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html

Nuclear! Nuclear! Nuclear!

Seriously - if you have any doubts as to the clean nature of nuke plants, you should look at article in this month's Wired magazine:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html

It's time for all to enter the hydrogen economy - and nuclear power is the way to do it.

NEW-Culer. It's pronounced "New-CULER"

Of course proving that we're warming the climate is a far cry from proving that a warmer climate would be a bad thing.

If our goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions then it
would seem to me a sounder strategy to reward people for
finding solutions rather them punishing them for not having
them.

To the best of my knowledge there are three prospective
medium-term technologies that look like they might work:

a) nuclear power

b) biodiesel via algae grown in seawater

c) solar sterling engines

And there are two prospective long-term technologies that
look like they might work:

a) solar power satellites

b) fusion

By medium term I mean it looks like they could be implemented
within 10 to 35 years and by long term I mean taking more
than 35 years.

In addition to these prospective solutions there are a
number of false solutions such as conservation, solar
power via solar cells, and wind power that although popular
on closer examination show no real promise of being able
to solve the problem.

Our goal should be finding a cheap way to make energy without
generating carbon dioxide or some even worse side-effects.
And to put a number on "cheap" I mean it should be no more
than twice as expensive per unit of energy as what we have
currently. The reason it has to be cheap is that the cost
of energy is a large factor in human wealth; if we adopt
a "solution" where energy costs ten times more than it
did previously then that would mean impoverishing an inordinately
large number of people.

For various reasons that I'll skip at the moment I'd like
to discard nuclear fission as a prospective solution. We
are then left with four prospective solutions and very possibly
there are more solutions out there that I am simply not
aware of or no one has yet thought of.

The goal then should be to without prematurely fixing on
a solution to throw a great deal of money and manpower at
these ideas until prospective becomes real and hopefully
even more than one real solution and then rapidly implement
them.

Large monetary prizes seem like a good way to direct large
amounts of money and manpower without prematurely fixing
on what seems most promising beforehand. Nor do I imagine
the problem can be solved in one fell swoop so it
would be more constructive to set up an iterative series
of prizes with tighter and tighter constraints as time
goes on.

Further, although better than nothing, I think it would
be an undesirable state of affairs if we ended up with
one company opening the patents on the solution. Instead
development and implementation of promising technologies
would proceed far more rapidly if at each prize winning
stage the winning technology would be opened up to any
company to further develop or implement. Thus the prize
would in effect be payment for the technology and of
course to motivate companies to sell their solutions
such prizes have to be fairly large.

I'm no specialist in this, but four points.
1) There's still, or was last time I looked, real doubt about the warming because radio-ballons don't detect it: I think the point was alluded to in New Scientist but not made explicit.
2) The modelling has an instructive feature. It starts off from the propositon that the inflow of heat from the sun is a constant, and then tries to account for changing accumulations and outflows. This constant inflow is a special case of an inherent problem: in modelling anything that's at all complex, the likeliest source of error is omission of effects that matter. In science you identify your errors by comparing the output of your model with the results from controlled experiments. But you can't do controlled experiments on a planet's climate: "climate science" isn't a science in the full sense. There's no shame in that; astronomy isn't a science in that sense either. When you have observations on an uncontrolled system rather than on a controlled experiment, you just have to do the best you can while accepting that standards of proof are necessarily weaker than in the classical laboratory sciences. I wonder whether climate scientists have all been as frank as they should have been about that limitation.
3) Even if you accept, as a basis for argument, that we are getting warmer and, more far-fetched in my view, that the models are good enough to base decisions on, you still have to predict global economic growth rates for the next century to allow you to predict CO2 emissions and thus future heating. The stuff published on this last step seems to me simply implausible. It contains, for instance, the assumption that the economic growth rate of Subsaharan Africa will outpace the achievements of the USA or Japan in their glory years. One can't say that such a prediction is wrong, but it certainly is unlikely by the most basic of tests: no-one sane would back the likelihood with his own money.
4) Incentives: scientists are all too human and their world is often viciously competitive. What keeps the lab man honest is the possibility that you can repeat his experiments and prove him wrong. See (2) above: this threat is absent when one can't do controlled experiments. Beware of scientists bearing research proposals.

But you can peform controlled experiments. Ice cores, temperature observations and so on are all examples of controlled experiments. They aren't done in the lab all the times and its nature that sets the controls (with ice cores, for example, nature captures the atmosphear at a particular point in time) but there's no such thing as a perfectly controlled experiment...even in a lab.

Predicting economic growth is iffy but remember its being used as a proxy for CO2 emissions...more growth = more emissions. This is linear thinking...assuming you can't cut CO2 by 10% without cutting GDP by 10% (or some other constant) which Jane has done in the past as well.

In this limited case it is proper because the models are trying to tell us how much 'CO2 heavy' GDP growth we can afford. Naturally CO2-lite GDP growth gives us the best of both worlds.

BTW, don't trash Subsaharan Africa so easily. It's quite easy to have huge growth rates if you're starting from a very low base. This is why its good to keep a level head when you hear that the US is growing at 2% while China is at 9% and is worried they are overheating.

Can you tell me how the models treat Subsaharan Africa relative to everyone else? For example, do they assume they will be giving off as much CO2 as the US or are they more of a tiny element in the model whose error is likely to be offset by an error somewhere else in the opposite direction?

4) Incentives: scientists are all too human and their world is often viciously competitive. What keeps the lab man honest is the possibility that you can repeat his experiments and prove him wrong. See (2) above: this threat is absent when one can't do controlled experiments. Beware of scientists bearing research proposals.

Be aware too of letting wishful thinking color your analysis. There's a lot of people who will save a lot of money if global warming turns out to be either wrong or irrelevant. This is a powerful incentive towards confirmation bias...only seeing evidence that fits your theory.

Boonton, how are ice cores and temperature observations controlled experiments? They're certainly observations . . . but what's the control?

Beware computerized climate models than cannot account for clouds - especially when they are unable to even "predict" the past.

AFAIK they don't take solar variability into account either.

This is not to say global warming doesn't exist.

It is not to say that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with global warming.

It is to say that we don't have reliable evidence upon which to base spending a trillion dollars.

Boonton, how are ice cores and temperature observations controlled experiments? They're certainly observations . . . but what's the control?

Why the change in the atmosphere of course! The ice protects the original bubbles from changes that happen over time. When you can't make your own controls you have to look for ones nature makes by accident.

In economics there was that famous study of the effects of minimum wage by comparing fast food employment in a NJ town where the state had just increased the wage with a nearby PA town. The observation controlled for different patterns of economic growth, taste, etc. by using two towns that were nearly alike in those things leaving differences explainable by only the different min. wage laws.

It is to say that we don't have reliable evidence upon which to base spending a trillion dollars.

What Jane has correctly depicted is that we are making a dramatic change in the weather system of this planet. What she also has shown is that the effects of these changes are indicate real global warming as a result but we are uncertain what that will mean.

I could easily turn around your assertion and say we can't bet trillions of dollars in potential costs that the clouds will be the magic bullet that will save us all.

Boonton, you seem to be confused about the meaning of the word "control" The ice cores aren't controlled; we have no other ice cores that we made in some other atmosphere with which to compare them. Nor do we have adequate specification of the environment in which the bubbles were formed, or of their subsequent journey through time. They are data, to be sure, but I don't think they make a controlled experiment.

"India and China will overtake us as world's biggest emitters in the not-so-distant future, and like the rest of the developing world, have shown no interest in leaning into the strike zone and taking one for the team.

"Also, environmentalists, to my disgust, continue to block the nuclear power plants that seem to me to be the only realistic hope for conversion to a hydrogen economy..."
~~~~~~

At least China's going nuclear in a big way ...
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html

... to Let 1000 Reactors Bloom, with special ambitions for the Pebble Beds...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

As to Greens, any Green who claims to be anti-global warming and who is also anti-nuclear is a fraud, fake, phony, poser, poseur ...

When there are only two choices in the real world, anybody who rejects both is not to be taken serioulsy.

Windmills are not going to run China.

Jane,

Perhaps ice cores aren't the best example to use. In a pinch I go to wikipedia:

To demonstrate a cause and effect hypothesis, an experiment must often show that, for example, a phenomenon occurs after a certain treatment is given to a subject, and that the phenomenon does not occur in the absence of the treatment. (See Baconian method.)

A controlled experiment generally compares the results obtained from an experimental sample against a control sample, which is practically identical to the experimental sample except for the one aspect whose effect is being tested.

So the core of the controlled experiment is to establish cause and effect. A phenomenon occurs after a certain treatment and does not in the absence.

Can you do this with climatology? Of course, you can compare weather before and after CO2 levels have increased (for this you'll need data from ice cores and other sources). But what about the fact that other things have changed in the last 100,000 years besides just CO2? In theory you would have to take those things and determine what effects they cause. Back out those effects and the change you are left with is caused by your one isolated variable.

Can this be done with global warming? Well first of all global warming is a theory built upon thousands of smaller theories which are themselves backed up by controlled experiments in many cases. You can't, of course, plop 100,000 variations of Earth into a lab (today you can barely get one simulation into our best computers) but you can study such things as how much energy CO2 gas reflects, radiates, and so on in a lab. You can develop a theory and observe if it fits historical data (for example, for ancient periods where we do have ice cores is there evidence for an increase in temperature when CO2 goes up? If not can the theory explain why it is an exception?).

Two points:

1. Nature does permit you to observe the results of 'controlled experiments'.

2. Climatology is not some type of 'virtual science' because we cannot do experiments on entire climates in a lab.

I don't have anything against nuclear power but I do suspect there are some limits on how much we can get from it. France is currently getting 78% of their electric from nukes, you'd think they would be happy to wean off of oil by adding a few more nukes to convert from gasoline to hydrogen.

But Jane, aren't you forgetting basic economics here? Decisions should be made by comparing costs and benefits. If CO2 is not a problem then the cost of nuclear reactors remains high (waste disposal plus safety) while their benefit is greatly reduced. If CO2 is a big problem then nuclear reactors have a benefit that coal and oil doesn't.

The problem is that CO2 has to cost! Right now CO2 is priced around $0. There is no benefit to a plant that emits little CO2 versus one that emits a lot, all else being equal. If CO2 is a big problem then the proper reform can only be to impose a cost on those who release CO2. The best policies to do that are tradeable emmission credits or a direct tax on CO2.

Then you could do a valid cost-benefit comparison between nuclear-coal-oil-and conservation.

As I understand it, solar heat is most definitely NOT a constant. I remember seeing a graph that showed that the current average world temperatures are about 2/3 what they were when the pyramids were built. Man-made global warming does not account for that. Solar heating does. We have a long way to go before we start spending trillions of dollars to "fix" what might not need to be (or be able to be)fixed.

If global warming is truly a problem it would be a lot cheaper to use rockets to send fine particles into the upper atmosphere, mimicking the effect of the "nuclear winter" scenario. just as it would have been a lot cheaper, not to mention faster, to simply dump bags of lime into the Adirondack lakes to counteract the effects of acid rain than to go after the polluters in the Ohio River Valley.

Something else that is imperfectly understood is the complex biofeedback cycle that we call Mother Earth (or Gaia). It has been experimently proven that extra CO2 in an enclosed environment gets absorbed into plant leaves, turning the leaves a darker green. As I recall the results of that study, the nutritional value of the leaves decreased with the increased coloration, which seems to be a bit odd. At any rate, we have no idea exactly how much CO2 the current plant life on the planet ("carbon sinks") can accommodate. We also don't know in what unexpected ways the biosystem might change, either. Assuming that Gaia reaches a new equilibrium (which it always does), what will be the localized effects? The possible effects of warming have been well publicized; other effects have not been. Will thunderstorms become more fierce? Or less?
Will there be more rainfall, or less? Or will it stay the same, but not in the same areas? The Sahara was not always a desert.

We simply don't know enough, but those folks who would like to see research projects funded are constantly shouted down by those who have already jumped on the "man-made global warming is fact" bandwagon to further their own ends.

Also from the IPCC report (via Lomborg's "Skeptical enviromentalist"): the net economic effect of temperature increase of up to 2C on the developed world will be positive. The net effect of 2-3C increase will be mixed. Only the effect of more than 3C increase will be negative.

We might be changing the world but not necessarily for the worst...

Jim Glass,

I think we do have plausible solutions in addition to
nuclear.

Not wind, but look at this paper by Michael Diggs on
biodiesel:

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

And here's some stuff on Stirling Engines:

http://www.stirlingenergy.com/whatisastirlingengine.htm

http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/csp.html

"Windmills are not going to run China."

They also don't satisfy the environmentalists: they (the windmills, not the greens) ruin the natural beauty of the landscape, and birds fly into them.

There is litigation over this in Kansas, and it's hard to imagine a better place for a wind farm.

But Adrian, I want more snow for skiing, not less.

If you read what Jane posted you'll see that the effects of 'carbon sinks' were addressed. They were called positive and negative feedback and the article concluded that it appears the positive feedback (more warming) outweighs possible negative feedback.

Adding to what denise said. Today's paper had this story:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Cape%20Wind%20Farm
Massachusetts officials fighting a project to build wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.

Boonton,

Sure, carbon sinks were addressed, but it's still a guess. That doesn't change what I said earlier: "At any rate, we have no idea exactly how much CO2 the current plant life on the planet ("carbon sinks") can accommodate." My point is that we still need a LOT of research and that our money is better spent on ths sort of basic research than on implementing expensive "fixes."

"These uncontested facts are enough to establish that "anthropogenic" greenhouse gas emissions are tending to make the atmosphere warmer. What's more, there is little doubt that the climate is changing right now."

In other words, correlation proves causality, and a laughably small sample size is sufficient! The argument given is such a typical, classic example of both the small sample bias and the problems with distinguishing between correlation and causality that my undergraduates have no trouble correctly indentifying both errors on exams, when I give them quotes about the conclusions on global warming.

I always thought that there must be some other, "secret" evidence that allowed scientists to be "sure". But if so, they're still keeping it a secret, because what's presented here is vastly inadequate.

Before people jump to conclusions, let me say that I would accept the argument that if we wait until we have conclusive evidence of global warming, it might be too late. Thus we should take reasonable steps today, even though it's clearly impossible to measure whether the climate is likely to change in the next few hundred years, much less whether any change will be due to human activity.

I'm all for taking preventive measures just in case, since the stakes are so high, but can anyone explain to me how scientists can use terms such as "we know for sure" and "there is little doubt" when they couldn't possibly know for sure from the current data? Less than 3 decades ago we all 'knew' that we were at the start of a new ice age - remember those cold winters in the 1970s and all the editions of Time and Newsweek with dinosaurs on the covers, talking about how humans would be the next world rulers to become extinct because it got too cold?

Again, I'm not against taking measures just in case. But I can't see how anyone that has taken (and passed?) even one introductory probability and statistics class can argue that the sample sizes discussed in this article are large enough for strong conclusions. 150 years, 60 years, less than 30 years - is this a joke?

Do scientists think that they have to lie because people are too simple to grasp an argument such as "we won't be reasonably sure until it's too late, so we need to act now, as a precaution"? Of course, that's the same argument that the Bush administration gave on WMD in Iraq, and some people seemed to have a tough time grasping it. Still, one has to try to give an honest explanation, and I didn't see one in the sample given.

If all scientists agree that a sample size of just 15 decades is sufficient to be 'sure', with 'little doubt', that human activity has already begun to make the earth warmer, then all scientists need to go back to school and take some more prob and stat classes.

Ann, do you actually believe it's just a matter of statistics?? What are your students studying? Economics? Statistics? Chemistry? Biology? It's NOT just a matter of a one to one correlation between CO2 increase and temperature increase. I'm always amused by the naysayers who try to claim it's probably increased solar activity. The scientists involved are climatologists. Exactly what kind of person would think that they don't think about the level of solar output and plug it into their models? Also, as far as the '70s go, thirty years is close to an eternity in terms of what instrumentation was available and how much more data has been accumulated. You claim that they are lying but then try to claim that you're open minded on the issue.

dearieme, the last time you looked must have been a few years ago. One interesting bit is that the upper atmosphere can cool while the lower atmosphere, which is what matters to us, warms up. John Christy, one of the scientists who used satellite data to criticize the idea of global warming has acknowledged that the seeming contradiction has be resolved with the resolution going to the warming side.

Up until now, I've assumed that there was probably more to the argument that was just being left out of discussions. But the piece that was cited here was shockingly lax on some crucial issues, which made me wonder why they always leave out the most important step. So again, I'm asking: do scientists really claim to have proven a permanent shift plus causality based on no more than a short amount of data? If so, what part of the evidence was totally skipped in this piece?

I didn't say anything about a one-to-one correlation, and I'm not pretending to know anything about the specific science involved, but a small sample is a small sample. And if we're talking about permanent climate change, 30 years may seem like close to an eternity, but it's still a small sample for what they're claiming to have found. Adjusting for solar activity or various other factors doesn't make the sample size bigger. In fact, it takes away degrees of freedom in the regressions.

If there's more to the argument, I'd like to know what it is. I still think that taking common sense measures now is better than waiting until it's too late, since the claims certainly might be correct. But based on what was presented in this piece, they're misrepresenting the level of certainty. And I have a hard time trusting people that misrepresent crucial parts of an argument.

So, if you're done being amused, perhaps you could drop a hint as to how they got a sufficiently large sample size out of a few decades (or even a full 15 decades) of data. What am I missing?

"Jim Glass, I think we do have plausible solutions in addition to nuclear."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In addition to nuclear, yes, many, of course.

Instead of nuclear -- for replacing all the coal and oil needed otherwise needed for the growing power grids of the next 100 years, and for providing all the extra energy beyond that needed to separate hydrogen -- no, none.

"we're playing with fire when we make huge changes to a complex system that we don't understand"

yeah, but...
according to the laws of chaos math,
we're playing with fire when we make even SEEMINGLY TRIVIAL changes to ANY complex system, whether we "understand" it or not!

What will be, will be, knowh'I'msain?

And whatever happened to the "coming ice age" I was warned about in the 70's? Is it held at bay by global warming?
Does this warming, then, unnaturally preserve the civilization which generates it; a sort of temperate bubble of accidental terraforming?

Or were those 70's alarmists as wrong about the "coming ice age" as they were about overpopulation and food and oil?

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice...."
It WILL end.

Millenarians and scientists agree.

We could, in the meantime, vote for 'Kyoto protocols' and squawk like Chicken Little in a vain effort to stave off Judgment Day.

Or seek to colonize other planets, under other stars.
Knowing all along that all stars die.

Or...hell, I don't know.

[*shrugs*]

This post from Cricton (from today's RealClearPolitics) is a relevant read
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html

1) Jim S: "John Christy, one of the scientists who used satellite data to criticize the idea of global warming has acknowledged that the seeming contradiction has be resolved with the resolution going to the warming side." Thanks: and is the same true for the radio-balloon data?

2)If I were trying to test the accuracy of a climate model, I would of course see if it "predicts" backwards successfully. Suppose that Prof Snooks has said for some time that his model has passed that test and reproduced the 'hockey-stick'. Now it seems that the hockey-stick may be bogus. What then for Prof Snooks' model? Well, he'll probably just adjust a parameter value or two, and carry on claiming success. Just my prediction: observation may bear me out.

National Geographic had excellent coverage on global climate change in the last year. They referenced the same scientific studies, but also discuss the shrinking/disappearance of glaciers which the "New Scientist" article only treats in a cursory fashion.

The shrinking/disappearance of glaciers including the polar icecaps is the documented, visible proof that the earth is warming. Warmer weather melts ice (duh). Most glaciers throughout the world are shrinking, an insignificantly small minority (like 10%) are stable or growing. This is consistent with climate models that show as overall global temperature increases, some locations will actually be cooler.

If anyone can explain why the vast majority of glaciers can be shrinking/disappearing without the overall globe getting warmer, please let the entire scientific community know.

Well, dijit, back when I was in school before the global warming hype it was taken for granted that glaciers retreated between ice ages. We were taught that where I live is covered under about a mile of ice during ice ages (approximately 90,000 years out of every 100,000) and the glaciers retreat during interglacial periods.

Where I live is was buried under a mile of ice during the last ice age and during the seventies we went out to the Athabasca Glacier and saw how much it had retreated over the centuries and preceding decades. That ice melts during climatic interglacial periods was one of those "well, duh", statements of the stunningly obvious.

In fact, the concern they pointed out was that during the 70s it appeared the Athabasca glacier was NOT melting, or at least was doing so at a much slower rate. This was seen as potential sign that the interglacial period was ending and we were reverting to another ice age.

Certainly no one during those days ever had such a silly idea that the climate or especially ice conditions ever remained stable.

[Windmills] also don't satisfy the environmentalists

Denise, please don't ascribe a single opinion to a diverse and amorphous group like "the environmentalists." Windfarms in Massachusetts are both a) supported by environmentalists who think we need to encourage green energy and b) opposed by some who think green energy is a good goal but that the back-door approach taken by Cape Wind to put them on territory where there is no review process in place because of state/federal turf battles sets a bad precedent.

There are, of course, going to be some people who oppose it because they think it's harmful to birds, but they don't speak for everyone or even most environmentalists. To say the subject is a complex one for environmentalists would be the beginning.

The people who put forth the bird arguments most vocally are often oceanfront property owners grasping at anything that would attract sympathy who never gave much thought to environmental policy before.

Sure, carbon sinks were addressed, but it's still a guess. That doesn't change what I said earlier: "At any rate, we have no idea exactly how much CO2 the current plant life on the planet ("carbon sinks") can accommodate." My point is that we still need a LOT of research and that our money is better spent on ths sort of basic research than on implementing expensive "fixes."

Rex, the problem here is that what has been done already points to a potentially expensive problem up ahead. I can rephrase your argument as:

We should gamble all those potential costs on the hope tht maybe clouds or some other 'carbon sinks' will turn out to save us after all in some way we don't understand yet.

A rational way to do this would be to implement easier policies to start assigning a cost to CO2 emmissions now and then either increase or decrease the cost as further research clarrifies how much of a risk we really face.

In other words, correlation proves causality, and a laughably small sample size is sufficient! The argument given is such a typical, classic example of both the small sample bias and the problems with distinguishing between correlation and causality that my undergraduates have no trouble correctly indentifying both errors on exams, when I give them quotes about the conclusions on global warming.

Sample sizes are relevant for inferences about populations. For example, what does the average income of a random sample of 100 people tell us about the average income of the entire United States population? You're confusing statistics and science, they are not always the same thing.

Less than 3 decades ago we all 'knew' that we were at the start of a new ice age - remember those cold winters in the 1970s and all the editions of Time and Newsweek with dinosaurs on the covers, talking about how humans would be the next world rulers to become extinct because it got too cold?

I've heard this several times. I do have some vague memories of 'global cooling' being discussed on TV but I was too young to follow the issue. Does anyone actually have any good information on the 'global cooling' idea from the 70's and the global warming one today? Was global cooling ever as accepted as global warming is in the scientific community today or was it just a few covers on Time & Newsweek?

Again, I'm not against taking measures just in case. But I can't see how anyone that has taken (and passed?) even one introductory probability and statistics class can argue that the sample sizes discussed in this article are large enough for strong conclusions. 150 years, 60 years, less than 30 years - is this a joke?

Sadly it seems like you took just enough probability and statistics to make mistakes in probability and stats! If I study how hydrogen & oxygen behave in a closed chamber I do not have to worry that this is just a tiny 'sample' of all the hydrogen and oxygen in the whole universe. This is because theory tells us atoms behave identically. H and O will behave the same on Pluto as it does on earth so my experiments are not 'surveys' of H and O. Understanding the behavior of the atmosphear is much more complicated but the principle is the same.

Don Linton's link above to the Michael Crichton speech is not merely relevant--it's highly relevant and a must read.

The big problem with windmills is that their output is too variable. I've read that if windmills start producing a serious portion of your power you have to build supplemental power stations that operate at below capacity most of the time to pick up the slack. Since a coal plant operating at less than capacity probably produces more CO2 per unit of power than one operating at full capacity (just like it takes less energy for your hot water heater to keep hot water hot than to heat up cold water from scratch every day) the CO2 savings you achieve with windmills is less than you would think.

Of course, if we found a cheap way to store surplus energy we could incorporate wind power to a larger degree.

Another problem with wind power (and solar and tidal power) is that the power has to be generated relatively close to the users of the power. The overwhelming attraction of fossil fuels is the combination of portability and high energy per mass. A cheap AND portable way of storing energy would change our lives in ways we can't even begin to imagine. (Whoa, that's not true, especially in science fiction. What we can't truly appreciate is how it would change our personal lives.)

Economically you can analyze energy like you would securities. Solar & tidal power have the advantage in that their payoffs are somewhat predictable. Solar is also good because it produces more power during the day when you need it. Wind power is more like a lottery ticket...it may or may pay when you need it the most.

There's no need though to just have one type of energy, though. A good portfolio would mix and match the strengths and weaknesses of all methods. This is why I said instead of just pontificating about our favorite type (nuclear, wind, exotic alternatives) the key is to let the market find the correct mix. This is done by assigning a rational cost to emmitting CO2.

Boonton, so what's your plan to assign a rational cost to emitting CO2, globally? It better not be the screw-the-USA plan that emerged from Kyoto.

Yes, global cooling was all the rage in the early to mid 1970's. A few good snowstorms in the northeast U.S. was all it took.

The advance or retreat of a single glacier infers nothing about global climate.

Remember last year, it took one suspected case of Mad Cow diease to totally cure the flu epidemic in the media.

Boonton, so what's your plan to assign a rational cost to emitting CO2, globally? It better not be the screw-the-USA plan that emerged from Kyoto.

The most efficient method known is a cap and trade scheme. The way this works is basically the gov't would auction off 'vouchers' for CO2. If your company produces 100 tons of CO2 a day you 'd have to buy vouchers for it. Say the market price was $100,000 per ton. If the company found a way to cut back by 10 tons that would save it $1M.

Environmental groups could put their money where their mouths are too in such a plan. They could buy vouchers in order to bid up the cost. In fact, vouchers could be purchased by investors as well hoping to speculate on their price swings. There are numerous variations on this type of plan...one would issue a base of credits allowing companies to pollute. If one company didn't use a portion of their credit they could sell it to one that is over their limit.

The second best way would be to simply tax CO2 (if you're opposed to additional taxes the revenue could be used to lower other types of taxes). There too the dynamic would be for the market to find ways to cut back on CO2 use up to the point that cutting back saves more in taxes than it costs.

Mark,

I still don't get a good sense of the global cooling story from the mid-70's. Was it just a media creation or was there a serious amount of science supporting it? I suspect I'll have to G**gle this for an answer.

Boonton,

There was just as much "evidence" then for global cooling as there is now for global warming.

For a sample of the tone of the coming ice age discussions in the seventies see this Newsweek article:
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm

It was also taught in schools as a very possible scenario.

Mark - the example of the Athabasca glacier was merely used as an example that was consistent with many other trends and observations of the day. No one ever suggested that a single glacier by itself could be used as a climate indicator.

I'm still agnostic on anthropocentric global warming. Global warming itself, no - there have been NO ice caps at either pole at times in the earth's history, and it wouldn't be at all surprising (though it would be highly inconvenient for us) if we were on that road again. (I'm still hoping for a shift in the earth's magnetic poles, as has happened many bazillions of times before, during my lifetime, just to see what it'd be like.)

But the volume of the oceans, one giant heatsink, and the robustness of the atmosphere in spite of the ebb and flow of life on earth up to this point make me wonder if *anthropocentric* global warming might just be our latest excursion into hubris. Reading up on it now, but I doubt that anything available today is going to be decisive for me.

Did I say "anthropocentric"? TWICE?

Freudian slip, I guess. I really did mean "anthropogenic." But "anthropocentric" fits my frame of mind on the subject...

Wikipedia has this to say:

In the 1970s there was increasing awareness that estimates of global temperatures showed cooling since 1945. The general public had little awareness about carbon dioxide's effects: at the time garbage, chemical disposal, smog, particulate pollution, and acid rain were the focus of the public concern. However, not long after the awareness reached the public press in the mid-1970s the temperature trend stopped going down. Even by the early 1970s there was concern in the climatological community about carbon dioxide's effects [1] (http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/quat_res_1972.html#schneider), and it was known that both natural and anthropogenic effects caused variations in global climate.

Concern peaked in the early 1970s, partly because of the cooling trend then apparent (a cooling period began in 1945, and two decades of a cooling trend [3] (http://www.env.leeds.ac.uk/envi2150/lecture7/lecture7.html) suggested a trough had been reached after several decades of warming), and partly because much less was then known about world climate and causes of ice ages. Although there was a cooling trend then, it should be realised that climate scientists were perfectly well aware that predictions based on this trend was not possible - because the trend was poorly studied and not understood (for example:[4] (http://www.wmc.care4free.net/sci/iceage/mason.1976.html)). However in the popular press the possibility of cooling was reported generally without the caveats present in the scientific reports.

The term "global cooling" did not become attached to concerns about an impending glacial period until after the term "global warming" was popularized. In the 1970s the compilation of records to produce hemispheric, or global, temperature records had just begun.

A history of the discovery of global warming states that: While neither scientists nor the public could be sure in the 1970s whether the world was warming or cooling, people were increasingly inclined to believe that global climate was on the move, and in no small way. [5] (http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm#L_0338).

It would appear that global cooling was primarily based on two possible theories. One was that pollution particulates would generate a small 'nuclear winter' effect reducing the sunlight that reached the earth, also particulates would increase cloud formation blocking more sunlight. The other was that slight changes in the Earth's orbit cause periodic ice ages over the geological timescale (and we are possibly overdue for one today).

I can't measure how much the scientific community advanced the theory as fact but it would appear it never moved beyond the hypothesis stage and even then the warming theory was starting to come into force. (You can't trust the popular press on these things because they are too easily seduced by the sensationalist aspects)

The pattern here appears to be greater understanding of the climate causing a change of opinion....not jumping from one theory to another with no general advance of knowledge and understanding. Feel free to refute this if you can otherwise I'll assume the 'global cooling' argument is no more than a rhetorical point.

I have a simple question:

If the earth's temperature has positive feedback, why doesn't a really hot summer turn the earth into a fireball?

And secondly: volcanos have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for a gazillion years. Yet the earth has been hotter in the distant past, not colder.
Why haven't volcanos turned the earth into a hothouse?

Given plant life et al, I would say the feedback to global temperature rises would be overwhelmingly negative (it is a greenhouse, after all....)

Gustavo,

Because there are both positive and negative feedbacks. This is what makes modeling the climate so difficult plus the fact that even the relationships we understand well still require great amounts of computing power to model (even with the best supercomputers around today).

Boonton said, "I can't measure how much the scientific community advanced the theory as fact but it would appear it never moved beyond the hypothesis stage and even then the warming theory was starting to come into force. (You can't trust the popular press on these things because they are too easily seduced by the sensationalist aspects)"

This applies as much to global warming as it does to global cooling. Read Michael Crichton's speech which I hope I successfully linked to my name or post or something.

I've read Crichton's speech, several times in fact. It is very good as a warning but quite frankly its application to this debate is limited. Either increasing CO2 will or will not generate global warming and this warming will have either a net benefit or cost to us. Of course we cannot predict the future, tomorrow some invention might make CO2 emissions as antiquated as the car made horse manure on city streets.

But this works in both directions, if tomorrow some invention allows us to tap lots of energy without releasing CO2 then Kyoto-like policies will not end up costing much at all (many people who cite Crichton don't realize the point works in both directions, there's a lot of junk science telling us that this or that policy will 'cost' hundreds of billions).

The fact is a lot of good science has been done so far and there's a plausible case for global warming that is stronger than cooling ever was. Therefore it should be addressed and not written off on a bet that we'll be bailed out by some magic uncertainity that will just happen to save us at the last moment.

W#hat I don't understand is why the CO2 issue needs to be addressed now as opposed to 20-50 years from now, especially given what is generally acknowledged to be the horrendous costs involved. As I understand it, less than 5% of annual CO2 production is human-caused, with the CO2-reducing proposals (including Kyoto) reducing that 5% by maybe 1-2%. The overall "reduction" is quite negligible. So what's the rush? Why not invest in truly scientific studies so we can attach better "guesses" to the parameters in the computer modeling? My argument boils down to saying that we need real science done now instead of chasing after the latest theory du jour.

Boonton - I was in High School in the '70s. The "coming ice age" was taught in one of my classes (I forget which class) out of the text book. We were asked to write essays on the topic of what life would be like when ice, again, covered much of North America. On Earth Day, a professor from the local college lectured us on what we could do to help prevent the (otherwise) inevitable catastrophe. (Most of the prescriptions, like drive less, use more energy efficient appliances, turn the thermostat down, having smaller families, etc., are very similar to the steps my children are instructed to take, today, to prevent global warming.) Global cooling, like the pending exhaustion of our oil supplies, was going to happen. The only question was which would happen first.

Having gone through both environmental scares, it does not appear to me that the first was overblown because of hype by the popular press while the second is more grounded. Both smack of "advocacy science". Advocacy science is similar to advocacy journalism -- the need to get people motivated to act justifies a lack of fidelity to the truth.

Maybe global warming is a real threat -- until we can account for the varying output from the sun, we won't know. (If solar output drops, we might need all the CO2 we can produce to keep from freezing!) Thinking we can control the climate by controlling CO2 emissions, while ignoring the sun's variable output, is like thinking we can control a dog by moving a single hair on the dog's tail. Sure, all other things being equal, we might be able to slightly influence the dog's direction over a great distance by diligently yanking on that one hair -- but anything the dog does on its own will swamp all our hair pulling.

I would address that by two points:

1. The bulk of the increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the modern age appears to be human caused.

2. The huge costs are based on the same dubious science you referenced in Crichton's speech.

3. If we wait 50 years we will miss a lot of 'low hanging fruit'...cheap reductions in greenhouse gasses that could be taken now. If, after making the easy cuts, we will have more research logged we can then determine if more expensive cuts are necessary. If so we will already have a structure in place for finding ways to make do with less emmissions.

I'm not arguing specifically for Kyoto here but for something to be done. Perferrably something along the lines of either cap-and-trade or a greenhouse tax that could be started at a low level and then increased if the science continues to back up the worse case scenero.

It's ironic that you attack Kyoto for addressing only a tiny portion of emmissions and for beign expensive! This implies that our economies have already been optimized for greenhouse emmissions...which is pretty implausible!

David,

You might indeed be right but as I said before your position is basically a bet....maybe the sun will cool down just enough to offset our increase in greenhouse gasses. That's a huge gamble to take.

The problem with the 'this is just another fad' line is that it is wearing thin. Global warming started as a theory in the 70's and is still going and apparantly getting stronger. It's beyond the scope here to review all the technical literature (and also beyond my expertise) but at some point you are going to have to say the theory is probably more accurate than the cooling theory was.

Boonton - My main concern with taking action on the theory of global warming is not so much a question of whether the earth is getting hotter but whether our actions can do anything meaningful about it. Picture an out of control train speeding towards a bridge that is out. Is a disaster pending? Yes, but my stepping in front of the train will have no perceptible affect on the train's progress towards the bridge. Stepping in front of the train will, however, have some very serious consequences for me.

Like many advocates of CO2 emission reductions, you may view the "necessary" reductions as basically costless. I don't view them in that way at all. The correlation between energy consumption and the overall physical health of members of a society (higher economic output means higher standard of living equals longer life) is far stronger than is the correlation between CO2 output and the ill effects of global warming. Crudely, but accurately, put: drastic reductions in CO2 output (without some magic bullet to replace the energy with some other source) will kill people. I'm not in favor of killing people now in the hope that we MIGHT save more people later.

The claim, that present day warming is "unprecedented" is fundamental to the conclusion that such warming is largely the work of humanity. But that claim has been greatly undermined not only by the work of McKitrick / McIntyre mentioned early in this thread but also by the paranoid and secretive manner in which Mann has reacted to an audit of his papers.

Too much of the global warming "conclusion" is based on correlation being causation, and the correlation is falling apart.

Instead of working out what's happening and why - which could take centuries - we can reward people for stabilising the climate, however they do so. My suggestion is that we issue non-interest bearing bonds redeemable for a fixed sum only when the climate has stabilised. Doing this would contract out the achievement of a stable climate to the private sector, and inject market efficiencies into the process. See http://socialgoals.com/ieakyototext.html for more.

Can't stabilize climate. Can't stop volcanos from erupting, earthquakes from happening and causing tsunamis, erosion from destroying Niagara Falls (we can slow it down, but lakes, mountain ranges, waterfalls are transient in geologic time).

Does anyone have a cite for a paper or something that would attempt to identify an atmospheric "tipping point"? That is, why the urgency to act now, when as David W. points out, a good portion of the world would stand to continue in perpetual poverty and privation if its ability to emit CO2 (that is, to have a robust power grid) were limited by concerns about global warming? We in the US can afford to be environmentalists (and we are, all of us, whether we like it or not); developing nations may not have that luxury yet.

Incidentally, anybody hear about the usage gas tax California's considering, such that every car would eventually contain a GPS unit that would communicate with gas pumps that would then charge a per-mile tax when you fill up? High-gas-mileage cars, it seems, don't support the freeway system as well as they should because they use less gas, so existing gas taxes aren't going to stretch far enough to maintain the roadways if enough people switch to hybrid vehicles. I see this as an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, so it's perhaps more germane to this discussion than it may have seemed.

Jamie,

Another blogger pointed out the California issue and stated that since Cal already requires emissions testing twice a year, during which they write down the car's odomoter reading, it would be much simpler to use those figures rather than fooling around with GPS and the concommitent privacy concerns.

You're missing lots of things, Ann. First you're trying to reduce everything to the methods of statistical analysis. Does the phrase "Lies, damned lies and statistics." Sound familiar? Sample size? "The effect this has on the planet is also measurable. In 2000, researchers based at Imperial College London examined satellite data covering almost three decades to plot changes in the amount of infrared radiation escaping from the atmosphere into space - an indirect measure of how much heat is being trapped. In the part of the infrared spectrum trapped by CO2 - wavelengths between 13 and 19 micrometres - they found that between 1970 and 1997 less and less radiation was escaping. They concluded that the increasing quantity of atmospheric CO2 was trapping energy that used to escape, and storing it in the atmosphere as heat. The results for the other greenhouse gases were similar." This speaks of precise measurements of specific wavelengths of radiation that are known to be absorbed by CO2 over a time period of 27 years. In that time frame there is no other source of increased CO2 that could come close to matching human activity.

OTOH, my reference to 30 years was not in terms of the time frame of taking measurements but how much our technology for acquiring data has improved.

In addition while I won't call them controlled experiments, ice cores do provide amazingly useful data that goes back thousands of years as do tree ring data.

Is a disaster pending? Yes, but my stepping in front of the train will have no perceptible affect on the train's progress towards the bridge. Stepping in front of the train will, however, have some very serious consequences for me.

Suppose the train is speeding towards a brick wall...throwing the breaks on now will spill everyone's drinks and it won't stop the train in time. However, if the train slows down even a little it will lessen the impact which may help and certainly won't hurt :)

All I'm saying is do the easy things first and then you'll have a few more years of research and data to examine. If it the evidence points to a major diaster you can start doing more drastic measures and will already have a head start (plus the market will already have started serious research in CO2 reduction so you might have some major innovations that we can't predict now). If it points to no serious problems you can think of the small amount you spent as an insurance premium that you didn't have to cash in.

If you believe in the market, as I do, then you believe the market will tend to produce results that optimize costs and benefit. If a variable has no cost it will not be optimized. Since CO2 and greenhouse gasses have no cost now they will not have been optimized for. If you give them a very low cost the market will reduce them a modest amount. If you give them a high cost the market will reduce them greatly.

Huh.
Don't see anyone even ATTEMPTING to refute any of the points I made earlier in this thread, namely:

Global climate = complex system = chaos math rules = you have NO CLUE what ANY action or inaction will lead to = do whatever, who cares?

We're all gonna die anyway: you think the Kyoto protocol will save you? Uh, yeah, ok...and maybe sending me all your money will save you: why don't you try that instead? ;-)

The earth WILL be destroyed. By an asteroid tomorrow, by the sun blowing up in a billion years, by fire and ice and Jesus rolling up the sky like a carpet...any way you slice it, the planet CAN'T be saved. It's doomed. Get over it.

So why all the hand-wringing?
Sha-la-la, live for today, knowh'I'msain?

Refutations, anyone?
Anyone?
Bueller?
Didn't think so.
:-)

The problem I have with the New Scientist article is that it doesn't address the issues Crichton describes relating to how much we can trust the 150 years of temperature evidence. Among other things, he points out that many stations report cooling and many report level temperatures. He points out that the technology used to measure temperatures in the past and the methodology was not so reliable. And he points out that the measurers were not any more vetted or trained back then than telephone-trained college student exit pollers are today.

Unreliable in itself isn't necessarily a problem. If the readings in the past had a high error but the error was random the data is still useful. In other words, if you are just as likely to get a temperature that was lower than the true one than you are getting one higher then over time the errors should cancel themselves out. If you see a long run warming or cooling pattern then it is probably real. This is for the same reason you are unlikely to flip a coin ten times and get heads for every toss.

What makes it more complicated is if there's a problem measuring temperature that caused a consistent bias. For example, suppose the equipment used before 1970 has a tendacy to under estimate temps. Then your data could have a serious problem if you don't adjust the pre-1970 data upwards to account for the bias.

Sheesh, is CA requiring TWICE YEARLY emissions testing now? Yet another reason not to move back...

Agreed that using odo readings from emissions tests would amount to a much smaller privacy invasion - but that wasn't my point. My point was that the number of people who buy hybrid cars SOLELY out of concern for the environment, with no economic benefit to them would seem to be pretty small. Like the number of people who recycle where neither curbside recycling nor a recycling center that pays for your cans is available. We ("we"? - whoever) just got car manufacturers to start making these hybrids by convincing them that either we ("we") would create incentives for people to buy them, tax credits and such, and/or that as long as the cars ran reasonably well, people would buy them on their own merits based on their lower operating costs. What now?

I was shocked and amazed to hear Glenn Beck of all people (?! not usually my go-to guy for insight) point out that it's the poor saps who can't afford to live close to city centers (i.e., the close-in 'burbs and the "good" city neighborhoods) but make enough to get out of the inner city who stand to be hurt the most by such a tax, since they tend to have the longest commutes. So there'll be a luxury tax first in an attempt to be "progressive," and then what? Public policy moves to get jobs out to the outer 'burbs and reduce commuting, leading to more sprawl, or to subsidize closer housing somehow? Heck, I dunno. The Law of Unintended Consequences works on relatively silly things as well as world-shaking ones. Insofar as it "works," I mean.

Boonton,

I am more skeptical than you are of the science, however I don't have any problem with your solutions. Even small incentives can have a major cumulative effect over time. Make it inexpensive enough to quiet down the skeptics and we should see the market look for solutions, even if not immediate reductions. Marginal costs can be a powerful thing when compounded over time.

I am not asking you to explain it yourself, but I would be interested in how the program would work more fully. I have seen many proposals for market based solutions to slowing emissions, but I would be interested in your favorites.

I would appreciate an explanation of how such a plan would address non industrial pollution (do we all get a car cap? or will it be based on gas usage rather than vehicle emissions? It seems as much as possible we should target emissions rather than carbon based energy usage per se.

Also on Global Cooling. It was a huge issue and the noted Global Warming theorist Stephen Schneider was the most famous proponent (and as hysterical the as he is now.) Interestingly I am not sure he was wrong then either (I say that as someone who is not a fan of the man.) A recent study (I can't find the link) posits, and quite convincingly to me, that global warming caused by humans is a long standing phenomenon which has in fact dramatically altered the climate. We would have a substantially cooler climate absent our behavior over the last ten thousand years.

The implications of that I am not sure of except I am unsure why we should prefer one state of nature over another. Cooler, warmer, is now the goldilocks scenario? Still, I think a cheap start on the issue would be prudent while we try and figure those questions out.

The fact is that climate changes all the time and we don't know enough to be able to control it -- and we probably couldn't control it even if we did have better understanding. Monkeying around with CO2 emissions is not going to "stabilize" the climate! I think the unrealistic expectation of a stable climate is fed by the fact that the climate has been unusually stable for about the last 10,000 years. We don't really know why, but it's pretty certain that it isn't going to last forever.

I haven't seen it explicitly mentioned in this thread, but the economic models I have seen indicate that it would be cheaper to compensate for the effects of global warming (e.g., by building sea walls, etc.) than to require substantial cuts in CO2 emissions. Of course, the economic models are probably no more reliable than the climate models.

Don't take all this to mean that I favor doing nothing. I favor continued research into understanding climate and I favor taking "reasonable" steps to reduce CO2 emissions (i.e., flexible, market-based, non-extreme steps).

One last point: I lost all respect for the Kyoto Protocol when they excluded nuclear power from the "flexibility mechanisms" that the industrialized countries could use to satisfy their Kyoto obligations. That just proves that reducing CO2 is not the dominant agenda behind Kyoto, and by extension, behind the global-warming agonizing in general. I know that some environmentalists do support nuclear power because of its potential to reduce CO2 emissions, but the existence of that part of the Kyoto Protocol proves that most global-warming enthusiasts really have some other goal besides reducing CO2.

Thanks Lance,

I would imagine it would be easiest for the cap to be applied to large industrial sources. So instead of a car cap the gasoline producer would probably have to produce the cap. Since they would pass the cost of the cap onto you in the form of gas prices you would have the incentive to either buy a more efficient car or drive less or both. Ditto for electric power. The wind farm or solar farm or nuke plant would not need to buy much of a cap at all while the coal and natural gas plant would.

Here is where the costs really come into play. If a new plant needed to be built the cost of buying the caps would have to be built into operating costs of a coal or gas powered plant. This would give a nuclear plant a cost advantage. How much though depends on specifics. Someone might find it would be cheaper to build a coal plant that captured CO2 and sequestered it deep underground or in the ocean.

I suppose we are leaving out the possibility of a a mechanism to catch CO2 on cars or something that sucks CO2 out of the air. But the cap could go in two directions. If you modified car sucks a net 1 ton of CO2 out of the air per year you could turn around and sell that 1 ton cap to someone else.

The McKitrick / McIntyre issue with the Mann hockey stick was discussed in a WSJ editorial today.

Interesting timing. I wonder if they picked it up from here?

I would appreciate an explanation of how such a plan would address non industrial pollution (do we all get a car cap? or will it be based on gas usage rather than vehicle emissions? It seems as much as possible we should target emissions rather than carbon based energy usage per se.

The trouble with that kind of plan is that it economically punishes everyone for driving, when driving is, for most of us, an unavoidable aspect of our lives.

There is an alternative, which has been implemented in Europe: a proportional tax on engine displacement, linked (IIRC) to the vehicle's license registration. Number of cylinders, miles driven, doesn't matter; the single greatest factor in "wasteful" fuel consumption will be how much volume the in engine has to be filled with fuel-air mixture to keep the thing moving, so the more of that you want, the more it will cost you.

An obvious downside is, how do you make special provisions for commercial and business-use trucks without gumming up the works à la CAFE?

The implications of that I am not sure of except I am unsure why we should prefer one state of nature over another.

Because warming could lead to more frequent occurrences of violent weather, in addition to sea leavel rises, with corresponding loss of life and/or loss and destruction of usable property. Of course, if warming turns out to be an uncontrollable phenomenon, it could lead to that anyway.

The article referenced about human effect on the climate over the last 8,000 years is in the March 2005 issue of Scientific American, although how it made it past the anit-industrial climate crisis true believers on its editorial board I'll never know.

Bringing up Goldilocks touches the real problem. We humans pretty much like the Earth just as it is now; not too hot and not too cold. Perhaps we should be developing technologies to engineer the global climate such as massive, artifical upwelling of deep ocean water in the tropics, increasing high-altitude particulates, or even interposing clouds of dust between us and the sun if it is getting too hot and being prepared to release large quantities of greenhouse gases if its getting too cold.

There really does not seem to be any moral way to prevent the rest of the world from wanting at least the life style our grandparents enjoyed nor any decent way to limit the population in developing countries other than to make them affluent.

The real question is how to make these activities profitable and therefore attractive.

Boonton: "The most efficient method known is a cap and trade scheme. The way this works is basically the gov't would auction off 'vouchers' for CO2. If your company produces 100 tons of CO2 a day you 'd have to buy vouchers for it. Say the market price was $100,000 per ton. If the company found a way to cut back by 10 tons that would save it $1M."

But what I wanted to know is, how are you going to persuade China, India, and the rest of the world to impose that plan on their own people?

The ozone hole situation was pretty well handled. An agreement was struck where the developing nations would get to use CFC a little bit longer than developed nations but in the end everyone agreed on a ban.

The skeleton of Kyoto is pretty good here. Basically its an international version of cap and trade where nations that are under their cap are allowed to sell the underage to nations that go over. In such an environment it is in everyone's interest to find ways to use less CO2. For those that are under using less means more profits selling underages, for those that are over less CO2 means the fewer vouchers that will need to be purchased.

If you can't get serious cooporation then it is still sensible to go it alone. Since the US is such a powerful driver of the world economy a demand for lower greenhouse gas production from the US will drive the international markets in that direction.

There's also the Crichton point. Someone may stumble upon some totally unexpected way to cut a lot of CO2 if people are given a reason to look for it...just like the car made horse dung in the city streets a moot problem.

Here's a link to another bit of recent news on the issue. But I don't expect some of the people here to be swayed by it. I tried to find the most liberal web site publishing it that I could

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/02/18/build/nation/35-global-warming.inc

>One last point: I lost all respect for the Kyoto >Protocol when they excluded nuclear power from >the "flexibility mechanisms" that the >industrialized countries could use to satisfy ?>their Kyoto obligations. That just proves that >reducing CO2 is not the dominant agenda behind >Kyoto, and by extension, behind the global->warming agonizing in general. I know that some >environmentalists do support nuclear power >because of its potential to reduce CO2 >emissions, but the existence of that part of the >Kyoto Protocol proves that most global-warming >enthusiasts really have some other goal besides >reducing CO2.

Probably typical UN-inspired, "stick-it-to-the-USA" type stuff.

Does global warming exist? I'd lean towards yes.
How much is human generated, as opposed to generated by natural forces?
How much is US-generated, as opposed to the rest of the world.
How long should we let the developing world "slide" as it were?

These and other questions I'd like to see asked and discussed. If we can move toward technologies that provide the levels of energy we need without putting out so much CO2, methane, etc. that is a good thing. But so much of the global warming/Kyoto advocacy seems to be handwringing about the SUV in San Diego, while ignoring the mass of Tijuana Taxis across the border, so to speak....

I've been debating the Michael Crichton speech

see http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html

with another person. Since it seems so relevant to
this discussion I'll post my reasoning here. In two
earlier posts on this thread I argued that we have
practical ways other than nuclear power to produce the
energy we need without emitting carbon dioxide.

It may seem incongruent then that here I'm expressing
skepticism about the scientific global warming consensus,
but I don't think it really is because (a) even if we are not
facing environmental catastrophe it would be to our
advantage to free ourselves of dependence on overseas
oil and (b) there are so many variables and so many unknowns
in how our climate works that even if I thought I knew
the answer (which I don't) it makes sense to explore options.

Dear xxxx,

I do think that "consensus" is the wrong word to use
in getting at what's going wrong. There's really nothing
wrong with a group of scientists coming to an agreement
on something. That's a consensus and really I think
there's nothing anti-scientific about that process and
in fact, all other things being equal, find an idea
more persuasive when a number of knowledgeable people
think it's the right one.

Political correctness is the problem; political correctness
when applied to science. The debate about global warming
is a good example. The problem is not that a large group
of scientists have come to share a common opinion; the
problem is how they came to share that opinion.

Basically there has never been a scientific debate about
global warming -- and that when you think about it should
be a red flag of warning. How could there not have been
a debate? Here to start with there were all these diverse
opinions (among scientists) and all these uncertainties
and all this different data to look at and all these
different ways to approach the subject. How is it possible
that there wasn't this big, long argument?

Because really there wasn't. One of the consequences of
that is we have no real trail of reasoning left today. If
I want to find a sophisticated debate laying out the
scientific arguments pro and con for all the many questions
that should be natural to this issue, tough luck finding
it because I've been searching for years and it doesn't
seem to be there.

So what happened?

Here's what I imagine happened. Remember first of all
that the government funds pretty much everything. Whether
you're working for a federal agency or a university
either way the money paying for the scientist's salary
is ultimately coming from the federal government.

The "consensus" was forged during the Clinton administration
and the debate that never happened should have started
then also. The Clinton administration led the issue by
deciding what the problem was and what the answer (Kyoto Protocol)
was also. There was that famous statement by I think Bill Richardson,
Clinton's Secretary of the Department of Energy, that any
scientist that didn't believe in global warming was a
"traitor."

Actually I don't think it's famous at all. It only
got into the back pages of some newspapers because after all it
was so dramatic and beyond that it got little attention
though really it should have. I'm sure that scientists
in the field noticed. I'm also sure that is was just
the tip of the iceberg as to the message being sent out.

Now how is it that political appointees were able to decide
so rapidly this complicated issue? Come on do we really
need to ask that question? Of course they had strong opinions,
and they wouldn't see their lack of expertise or lack of
scientific aptitude as a problem.

So that message gets out and its a pretty strong message
because these are the guys paying the money and deciding
who gets funded.

What else is going on? Well for one thing, as in practically
every field there are a lot more people getting degrees in
this area than there are jobs available. Every time that
happens I believe there is a tendency for other factors than
qualification in the field to become important in choosing
who gets hired.

Look imagine you're one of ten people competing for the
same position. All of you are on paper qualified to do
the job. How do you distinguish yourself from the others
and get that job?

A lot of people have an emotional committment to some
political view. Once a scientific issue becomes charged
politically, then people invest emotions in it and people
commit to it and people get hired or not because of their
political views.

And then others sense the way the political wind is blowing,
and pretty soon every one is committing to it, even if some
are only pretending.

The chinese used to have an exam that determined whether or
not one became a civil servant. Everyone that wanted to
become such (which was a lot of people) took this exam and the
highest scorers got the jobs. In some ways this seems a stupid
system because how much did this exam have to with being
a good civil servant? Not much. And we think we know
better. But stupid as the exam system was, at least it
was objective.

The way we do it, scientific fields and academia can be
politically captured and this is happening.

The scientific "consensus" on global warming was not arrived
at through scientific debate. It was initiated at the
highest levels of our government and most of the papers
in the field were written after the "consensus."

Questioning the consensus can be a career killer.

The skeleton of Kyoto is pretty good here. Basically its an international version of cap and trade where nations that are under their cap are allowed to sell the underage to nations that go over.

A skeleton won't walk very far without flesh, and Kyoto's flesh was pretty rotten, perhaps irremediably short of a complete rewrite. I would like to see the US install a nationwide cap-and-trade program on CO2, however. We were pioneers with our sulphur dioxide program to the point that some of the European countries have studied it carefully in contemplating how to meet their Kyoto obligations. We ought to be able to do that twice.

There are at least three problems with this New Scientist account of the climate change debate.

First, they underestimate the number of contrarians among scientists. Off the top of my head, I can more than triple the two - Michaels and Lindzen - listed in the piece. And there are well over two hundred climate scientists ranked as antropogenic climate warming skeptics on a yahoo.com groups list. (As a mere environmental scientist, I was ineligible to join.)

Second, despite the findings of the ICL group in 2000, there remains the unresolved mystery of decoupling. The only truly global temperature - provided by satellites - shows no substantive evidence of warming over 30 years time. If there is real warming, it it restricted to less than 5000 feet of atmosphere. None of the models predicted this and there remains no good explanation for the disparity between observed data and theory.

In sum, I find myself in agreement with Michale Crichton. See his recent presentation at AEI in Washington, D.C. - as broadcast on C-SPAN - to hear all about it. His recent book reflects this understanding.

But finally, Crichton commented on Oreske's bizzare findings. He said there are some 12,000 papers listed in the IPCCs bibliography for the last decade alone. Since her search resulted in a discrete number of hits (932?), someone is now working out what particular combination of terms resulted in her obviously misleading results.

There is more, perhaps much more, to accurately rendering the story than this New Scientist article reveals.

In reply to dijit, who writes "The shrinking/disappearance of glaciers including the polar icecaps is the documented, visible proof that the earth is warming. Warmer weather melts ice (duh). Most glaciers throughout the world are shrinking, an insignificantly small minority (like 10%) are stable or growing. This is consistent with climate models that show as overall global temperature increases, some locations will actually be cooler."

Actually, my understanding is to the contrary. The Alps and central Rockies are loosing glaciers. Scandanavia and Greenland is adding ice. And Antarctica, while losing ice along the margins is stable overall.

A critical review of the recent dustup over the Arctic is avasilable here http://www.greeningearthsociety.org/wca/2004/wca_27b.html

Overall, our data on the worlds glaciers is rather soft and far from scientific, despite the fact that fresh water resources are increasingly important. I've seen the "90%" of all glaciers are in decline figure before, but I do not know the source. My guess is that it comes from partisian environmental groups, that it's an old or obsolete figure, and to distrust such certainties.

Scientific uncertainties do not make for good exploitable alarmism!

Orson betrays himself in two ways. The satellite data he cites has been resolved more towards the side of warming than not. Try looking at something from as recently as 2003 instead of 2000. In a field as heavily studied as global warming things can change quickly when a bunch of smart people wonder what is behind apparent contradictions. Secondly, he cites the web site of an astroturf group like The Greening Earth Society, an organization funded solely by the Western Fuels Association.

Secondly, he cites the web site of an astroturf group like The Greening Earth Society, an organization funded solely by the Western Fuels Association.

It never ceases to amaze me that some people feel perfectly justified in totally dismissing the views of individuals or organizations that they disagree with. How about addressing the content of the discussion referred to, instead of dismissing it out of hand because of its funding source? (I doubt that research supported by the Western Fuels Association is any more biased than research by environmental organizations.)

Mike, your response to my post is complete and utter B.S. The Western Fuels Association will never fund anything that might possibly result in a lessening in consumption of hydrocarbon fuels. Ever. You bring up some crap about research funded by environmental organizations whereas the truth is that the overwhelming majority of the funding for the research you disagree with doesn't come from that source. Your post shows that many of the naysayers on this issue don't have one ounce of intellectual honesty.

Jim S: I repeat, how about addressing the content instead of dismissing it out of hand? Do me the favor of some intellectual honesty.

I have read quite a few contrarian articles in the non-scientific literature attacking various aspects of the global warming orthodoxy, but there is precious little comparable from the orthodox camp. Because I am not an expert on the scientific literature on the subject, I may not see the holes in a contrarian argument that sounds plausible. But most of the rebuttals are like yours -- insults and appeals to authority, rather than explanations or pointers to better scientific papers (plus why they're better). The results discussed in that article on arctic warming that you are so dismissive of (and others I have seen elsewhere) sound pretty reasonable. What's wrong with them? And please note, the article is not discussing research funded by the Western Fuels Association, but papers in the scientific literature by people who sound like experts to me.

One reason I am more than willing to put down the site is that I notice that the article on the site is not accredited. They say that climatology is their profession and passion yet they don't sign their own publicly published (at least on the web) work? You did notice that, didn't you? Another reason is that in what they are trying to paint as an objective article they use this phrase "But in truly Clintonian fashion, a great deal depends on what the definition of “Arctic” is.", they refer to other studies that they disagree with as being "infamous". Not exactly apolitical, is it? In addition note that the entire article is an attack on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report. They even claim that it was pulled from distribution for failing to meet Federal standards for scientific accuracy. Really? I looked around for quite a while and I couldn't find one thing to support that statement. While the Bush Administration might not distribute it and give that as a reason I don't buy it. I think there were about 1600 scientists who have called on the Bush administration to quit overriding science in the name of policy and perhaps that's what they are referring to.

In doing a bit more research I note that there is no recent opinions available from the scientists whose articles are cited. New evidence generally can lead to new opinions. Always pay attention to the dates. A paper from 1993 does not necessarily reflect current thinking. In addition it's not that difficult to cherry pick parts of a paper. In an article interviewing Polyakov and one of his co-authors we find this gem:
'"It's not simple," Polyakov said. "Judging climate by the recent 20 years may not give a suitable guess as to what will happen in the future."

Uma Bhatt, a co-author on the new paper and research assistant professor at the International Arctic Research Center, said many people assumed that global warming hit the north harder than more temperate latitudes, but not many challenged the idea.

"Everyone accepts polar amplification as gospel, but it's based on a partial picture," she said. "I believe in climate change, but something more complicated is happening."

Part of the climate confusion in the north is the fault of long-term weather patterns that make some periods cool, some hot. The 1990s were the warmest decade ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, but the 1960s were cool enough that some scientists wrote papers about an approaching ice age.

Polyakov and Mark Johnson, a researcher from UAF's Institute of Marine Science who is also a co-author on the recent paper, have found a tendency for northern temperatures to flip-flop every 35 years or so. They named the phenomenon the low-frequency oscillation. Driven by physical processes in the north Atlantic Ocean, the oscillations coincide with varying periods of atmospheric pressure. Low pressures over the Arctic, for example, cause more precipitation over land and less sea ice.

Scientists are now focusing more on the long-term patterns in the Arctic for a better view of the future, which is not quite as simple as a canary in a coal mine.

"Understanding the natural variability is important to understanding the change," Bhatt said. "It's more complicated than we thought."'

Note that neither of them is saying that there is no overall pattern of warming, just that simple models don't necessarily provide all of the answers. Also note that Polyakov's co-author explicitly states that she does believe in climate change.

Here's a link to a more recent article that does in fact cite the scientists that the fluff piece feels are being ignored:
http://www.nersc.no/AICSEX/Johannessen_Tech_rep_218.pdf
Being newer and having more data and newer models, they come to different conclusions. That's the way it works. Notice that the articles that they use to support their position, which if you look at some of the slanted language they use definitely appears politically motivated are older. Also notice that the article that I mentioned and that prompted Jane's post are also newer and therefore have more data and more analysis of the earlier pieces to draw upon.

http://www.poplyrics.net/waiguo/soundtrack/SouthPark/044.htm

Jim S: I really did not mean to defend that Greening Earth Society write-up. My initial point, which is the only point I really intended to make, was that I don't think it's fair to simply dismiss it with a comment that it was funded by some energy company. That's really just a form of ad hominem attack -- you're basically saying that anyone who works for an energy company must be dishonest.

Your comments this time are more on-target. It's fair to say that they use loaded language and make partisan comments (and I don't even understand what point they were trying to make by their "Clintonian" crack). However, the figure from Polyakov et al. is interesting -- and it's from 2002, which is more than recent enough to be relevant. If there is some problem with Polyakov's methodology, that is the kind of comment that would be truly useful to make (along with the substantiation). The other important point in the write-up is that the ACIA did not give the source for their temperature graph, which is a serious omission if true (I'm not quite interested enough in this to slog through their report to see if I can figure out what their source is). The rest of the write-up is pretty much chaff. Their overlay of an extrapolation of recent temperature trends on the ACIA model projections is interesting, but of course it's not true that the temperature increase has to be linear.

My point in quoting another article that quotes Polyakov and his co-authors is to point out that the Greening Earth people misrepresent his study. They try to represent his study as something that disproves the global warming theory. In truth he is simply saying that because of a relatively short term cycle of cooling and warming that occurs naturally in the Arctic that it's extremely difficult to determine any effect that human caused warming over the last 100 to 150 years might have had. The other article I linked to looks at the Polyakov study as well as others and draws a different conclusion because of how they studied variations in ice thickness among other things as opposed to the data that Polyakov looked at. My reaction to the Western Fuels web site comes from having done a lot of looking at their articles and all of the naysayers who try and use their questionable articles and methods to justify their position. Also remember my criticism of their habit of not "signing" their articles. If you really believe in it, put your name on it.

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