Climate skepticism in the language of your choice
There’s a lot of good news on the consensus front in Europe, noted by Hans Labohm, a Dutch economist and IPCC reviewer. It shows that skepticism on climate change is gaining a foothold throughout the countries of the EU. Far from buying the alarmist orthodoxy, opinion in Europe are divided about the truth and extent of global warming. It probably benefited more than any other continent from the medieaval warming period that permitted the expansion of agriculture and, some historians hypothesise, helped fuel the Renaissance. Russian scientists are even pointing to solar activity, which seems headed for another “Maunder Minimum”, and predicting a Little Ice Age, such as Europe experienced in the 18th century. Imagine what today’s efforts to prevent warming will look like if that happens. Our children will think we were insane. Imagine a world in which they ban hybrids and subsidise large, heavy gas guzzlers on safety and environmental grounds.
On the Nobel Peace Prize, Labohm notes the political composition of the Norwegian panel that awards it, and adds a telling quote:
Little wonder Francis Sejersted, past chairman of the committee, admits: ‘Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.’
Speaking of children, he answers the concerns of at least one commenter on my blog, who is convinced that we must all act immediately to help her children survive; to wit:
And what about our kids? Well, they have survived the story of Santa Claus without any visible scars. Wouldn’t they survive the nonsense of man-made global warming as well?
Labohm has written a useful and heartening roundup of which people and organisations aren’t meekly swallowing the politically-correct Gorthodoxy that dominates the media today.
Update: Link to comment pointed in the wrong direction. Fixed.
Check this out:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/0,1518,grossbild-1012661-515497,00.html
It shows the average temperature on our cosy planet during the last 150 years. the zero line is the average temperature 1960 till 1990. Even my cat can see that it’s getting hotter. There are similar diagrams for the CO2 content in the atmosphere.
The question is: are they coincidental or are they related?
My answer is: Do we really want to find out?
Of course most of the doomsday scenarios are vastly exaggerated, but what’s wrong with reducing your environmental footprint? Additionally a positive side effect of reducing fossil energy use is that we get politically less dependend on dodgy regimes in countries like Russia, Saudi-Arabia, Iran, etc.
THanks for the comment. Several responses immediately come to mind:
That chart exaggerates the data it represents, by using only a very small range on the y-axis. Even if it didn’t, however, it uses data that has a built-in adjustment that makes sure it appears to be getting hotter (just like Michael Mann’s hockey stick used a formula that turned even random data into a hockey stick). An interesting analysis of that chart is presented here: remove the adjustment, and the warming goes away altogether. Even if that chart is indeed accurate, it reflects only a century or so of data, which in climate terms isn’t very much at all. Longer-term estimates vary, but none of them (except Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick) suggest anything abnormal is going on.
The CO2 chart doesn’t look similar at all. It shows a fairly constant rise throughout the century, instead of the up-down-up trend of typical temperature charts. By contrast, the solar activity chart for the same period correlates almost exactly with the temperature data. Coincidence? Do we really want to find out? Of course. But that means rejecting the notion of a politically manufactured “scientific consensus” that says man-made CO2 is the biggest cause of climate change. It isn’t. Besides, science is never settled, and on climate in particular the science is as unsettled as science can be.
There’s nothing wrong with reducing your environmental footprint. I never said there was. What I oppose isn’t voluntary action, but coercion. I object to laws that prevent people from making subjective value decisions, or taxes that raise the cost of living for dubious purposes. Using force against people who may or may not agree, and who may or may not be able to afford it, is wrong. There are higher priorities in the world than expensive government programmes to solve what may not even be a problem in the first place. For a start, reducing poverty in the developing world is a higher priority.
I agree that reducing dependence on dodgy sources of energy is an excellent reason to investigate alternatives. And since the degree of risk is reflected in the oil price, a higher oil price makes other sources of oil, and more expensive alternative sources of energy, more economically viable. Every oil company on the planet is investigating economically viable alternatives to Middle Eastern and Russian oil.
However, most environmentalists oppose that too: they’re against many US drilling projects, for example, even though their environmental impact is small, and is down to a fraction of what it would have been thirty years ago. They oppose nuclear power. They even oppose classical “green” energy in many cases. What they really want is to reduce energy use altogether, to curb what they see as the real evil: free market capitalism. Governments are happy to oblige, because the same political arguments, motivated by what are at best exaggerations, and often outright lies, give them a great excuse to expand their powers and raise more taxes.
It’s the false propaganda that I object to. It’s the lies and exaggerations used to convince people that they must pay new taxes, obey new regulations and submit to new bureaucracies, that I fear. This impoverishes millions of people, and depletes resources that can be better used on more immediate, certain projects.
It’s a long answer, but I hope I’ve addressed all your points, at least. :-)
Hi,
Sorry, but I can still see an increase in temperatures over the cycles in your diagram. The solar cycle is only seven years IIRC. This would explain the high variance in the temperature chart. It would be interesting to see a chart adjusted by the solar output. (that’s not linear, btw. more like to the forth root because of bolzman’s law.) You’re right with the zero point, BTW: if you set it to zero (-> 0 Kelvin) you won’t see anything. but if you would, we would it would mean we would oscillate between venus and mars tempeature wise…
when it comes to the “politically manufactured” part of the climate debate, my impression was that the IPCC report was poltically tailored to be _less_ disastrous instead of _more_. Also the best computer models we have so far, are in quite good agreement with observation data. (I know, because I’m into simulation technology by means of being computer science major.)
Priorities: Well, the first thing is that poverty in developing countries wouldn’t be a big issue in the industrialized world anyway. (That’s sad but it’s true.) Given the fact that your post is talking about europe, which I usually count as industrialized, and most of the energy consumption is by industrialized countries, why do not letting them reduce their footprint? The second thing is, that the whole game is not a zero-sum game. You can have _huge_ effects on employment by this. For example you can build whole industries to insulate houses, producing solar geysers, producing bio-gas, etc. All of this reduces energy footprint quite considerably, helps abating poverty, does _not_ lower the standart of living a single bit and finally is firmly based on market capitalism!
When it comes to taxes, please tell my why your standard of living is higher when you drive a SUV which uses about 18liters/100km than it is when you drive a Toyota Prius consuming 4 liters. Even if your taxes are 100% you will still pay less for the petrol in the second case than in the first. Additionally to discouraging energy waste (but at the same time not making it impossible, which would be the “communist” approach) those taxes can be used for something useful, like fighting poverty!
I don’t have time, right now, to argue each point in detail, though much of the logic of my position was covered in a previous post: 10 reasons to reject global warming.
I do want to say something about models, however. Computer models for highly complex, mathematically chaotic systems, are very difficult to create. The problem isn’t the computer science, but the mathematics and the data. With climate, scientists do not have complete or fully reliable input data, they don’t have long data series, they don’t model all interactions in the system, and they end up having to rely on calibrating the output against assumptions about “expected” behaviour. Computer models of chaotic systems can be useful for discovering the impact of a few variables on a well-modeled system that matches observed data, but their long-term predictive power is weak, and becomes exponentially weaker the more variables are involved. A hint is that (as far as I know) climate models have so far failed to predict the past, given the same feedback assumptions and initial data.
I know that computer models are not perfect, since I have dealt with them for a few years by now. (More in the area of fluid and structural mechanics, but the differential equations for the climate models are quite similar but with more couplings.) The point is: although they don’t allow to forecast the weather at 20th June 2058, their long term predictions when it comes to averaged quantities have been prooven to be quite accurate if the boundary conditions (content of various gases in the atmosphere, oceans, and yes solar radiation) are consistent with reality.
Also, much of my last post also wasn’t directly related with climate change. So I’d like to have an answer to the question of how unnecessary waste of energy can improve your standard of living!
Of course wasting energy doesn’t improve you standard of living but why is that energy even wasted in the first place? Because it can be afforded regardless- And that’s the choice garnered from free market capitalism.
And in any case, who would want to conserve or ration oil? The faster we use it up the more expensive and untenable it becomes and the more appealing the alternatives look.
Depends what you call “unnecessary”. If someone chooses to “waste energy”, they clearly do so because they do not believe the cost of saving that energy outweighs the benefits.
It’s a very simple price issue. If the cost of production is raised by universal rules imposed by laws resulting from international treaties, the amount produced decreases. This decreases profits, which decreases capital available for investment, for buying goods and services, and for employing people. That raises the real cost of living.
Besides, it is not justifiable to force such decisions on people by law, simply by claiming it’s for their own good.
On models: what long-term predictions of climate models have proven accurate? How exactly did they “prove” this? Did they compare against actual climate averages during the 2050s?
My definition of ‘unnecessarry’ waste of energy is that not wasting it doesn’t reduce your standard of living if you don’t waste by means of slightly changing your focus.
Let me give you a few examples of what I mean with ‘unnecessarry’:
- Huge, fat, overpowered cars: As I explained in my comment before you can get from A to B just as well or even better with a Toyota Prius than with a MG Hummer.
- Uninsulated housed: Instead of spending several thousands of rand every your for heating and air conditioning, why not simply insulate your house well and get the price back over the next ten to fifteen years in terms of saved energy costs. after that your balance gets positive!
- Using uninsulated electrical geysers: SA has sun in abundance. Heating water takes a lot of energy (about 5kW seconds per Kelvin and liter). Why not insulating geyser and putting a solar panel on the roof which does the job basically for free? Cost wise the same argument as with house insulation applies.
- Using ordinary light bulbs instead of low energy bulbs.
- Outdated heating/aircon systems. By upgrading older ones older than about 20 years, you can save 50% of energy just by increased efficency of the new ones.
- In the industry: Not reusing process heat. why blow heat out of the chimney instead of using heat exchangers to recover a substantial part?
There are several other possibilities of how to save energy without sacrificing your quality of life, but I think you got the idea. The point is: Energy taxes encourage people to upgrading their facilities _now_ instead of in ten years when energy prices will probably have gone through the roof anyways. I agree that energy taxes must not exceed a level where energy using the most efficient technology available today is still affordable.
Sorry, forgot to answers the models question: Read the scientific part of the IPCC report (not the summary for policy makers) for the tedious details. The models have been fed only with the boundary conditions (green house gases, solar radiation, etc) of the period where observation data is available and predicted the average temperature on the planet quite accurately.
Energy taxes shouldn’t exceed zero. As a policy instrument, you tax something you don’t want people to do: smoke cigarettes, for example. Discouraging the use of energy is fundamentally daft.
On models, what I’ve read would dispute your claim on both the completeness and accuracy of climate models. To over-simplify, they’re large fluid-dynamics models, which ignore a whole host of influences on climate, and inadequately model the rest, in order to reach pre-determined results.
Besides, since we’re proposing to base public policy on 100-year predictions, I’d like to see 100-year prediction records. Sadly, Babbage’s Difference Engine never was applied to the thorny question of climate.
I have little faith in them, and I also studied computer science (and applied mathematics). But I’ll return to this subject with some more detailed research, in due course.
> Energy taxes shouldn’t exceed zero.
I think you live in a kind of a fantasy world. Let me give you an example: Do you know where the current big troubles of american car manufacturers come from? It’s because the US doesn’t tax petrol, so these companies focused on fat cars which were appreciated in america but largely unmarketable in Europe and Japan because there they heavily taxed energy so the european and japanese manufacturers had to focus much more on efficient technologies. Now that the oilprices have quadrupled over the last decade, the american manufacturers get spanked even by the american consumer for their poor milage. The problem is: GM, Ford & co trail the bleeding edge about one decate when it comes to efficient technology. Now tell me: What has the non-taxation bought the american economy except a high dependence on dogy regimes and the Iraqi war?
> On models, what I’ve read would dispute your
> claim on both the completeness and accuracy of
> climate models.
What a courage! Your argument would have a point if you would only look at a _single_ model. But if _all_ models which are consistent with the past predict the same thing (to some extend) it takes quite some talent denying reality to believe _all_ of them are wrong. I’d rather believe in the tooth fairy…
Anyway, what makes you qualified to refuse the validity of years of research of a gazillion mathematicians, meteorologists, physicists and computer scientists? If you could come up with _several_ peer reviewed and well understood climate models which are consistent with the past _and_ predict that it is _not_ getting warmer, you might have a point.
Face it: Man made climate change is a fact to the same extend as evolution is! You are partially right when it comes to the magnitude and the consequences of climate change, though: Nobody can predict either accurately. BUT: I for my part don’t _want_ having to predict what the consequences will be, I only _know_ that life is quite comfy on this little planet right _now_!
> Besides, since we’re proposing to base public
> policy on 100-year predictions, I’d like to see
> 100-year prediction records.
What about antarctic ice cores? What about drilling cores from sediments? What about the records of the growth of trees? All of these together allow to estimate the climate over a _much_ longer period than the past 150 years!
> Sadly, Babbage’s Difference Engine never was
> applied to the thorny question of climate.
The difference engine was never build in it’s time, would only have been good to evaluate polynomials and didn’t have any control statements whatsoever. This statement tells me you don’t know what you’re talking about!
You seem to be labouring under a heavy weight of emotion and literal-mindedness. I would have thought a computer science major would get the joke about Babbage. I’m not going to respond to insults to my intelligence or my right to hold opinions on this matter either.
But if it’s peer-reviewed papers you want, here’s one I blogged about two weeks ago: Why is climate sensitivity so unpredictable? (PDF).
This is what I had to say about it: Climate clairvoyance is certainly uncertain.
Well you seem to suffer from stubbornness even more.
The paper you mention is _not_ a climate model (since it’s by no means based on physics), but just an approach of “let’s find some analytic curve which can approximate the past \Delta T(\Delta R_f) function reasanbly well”. They also assume big, reliable sinks as only feedback effects without explaining what they could be physically. Since reasonable modelling is impossible without these feedback processes anyway, pretty much all modern climate models have them already included. In fact most models predict some of the sinks will become asymptotic (oceans) or even contribute greenhouse gases (permafrost). In the context of the paper this would mean a constant C > 0 and then even the curve presented there shows a very significant increase in temperature.
Also, would you please, please, please with sugar, be so nice to give answers to the questions of how the measures I mentioned above can reduce your standard of living and how exactly energy taxes are bad for the economy? Your original post talks about Europe, where I happen to live. Europe has amongst the highest energy taxes in the world, yet many of the world’s most prosperous economies (in terms of both, the GDP and the HDI) are european. I can see a clear contradiction to your argument which I would like you to explain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
The paper is not intended to be a climate model. It is a critique of climate models. It argues why climate models are inherently unreliable means of long-term prediction, and they cannot be fixed even in principle.
If you’d actually read my post on the subject, you’d have noticed me saying I don’t entirely buy that last bit, though I accept that it is true given the current state of our theoretical, empirical and methodological knowledge.
Speaking of reading what I write, I did answer your question on energy taxes.
I’ll repeat, very briefly: Taxes distort prices, thereby leading to less efficient choices and/or raising the cost of what is being taxed, which makes these things (and in the case of energy everything else) more expensive, which means there’s less of it for everyone, which lowers the standard of living. Very simple economics, really. That’s why tax (or prices set by government) are useful policy instruments. You raise them on things you want less demand for (taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, imports, or central-bank interest on credit, for example), and lowered on things you want to encourage (tax breaks for small business, new mothers, education, retirement savings, etc.) By taxing energy, however, you discourage virtually all production, which is exactly what raises prosperity. I hope it’s clear now.
As for your point about Europe, you’re confusing cause and effect. For the most part, Europe didn’t get rich by taxing people. It got rich first, largely by permitting free enterprise. Sweden is an excellent example of this. Once you are rich, of course, you have a lot of fat to burn. You can spend your wealth on carrying heavy bureaucratic overheads, subsidising farmers to produce too much food (or none at all), offering expensive social services and benefits, or imposing more and more restrictions and rules on businesses. First, you end up having to tax people highly. Then, you find that even that isn’t enough, and you discover that rising unemployment and aneamic growth are the costs you pay for such luxuries. Even rich Europe is starting to look towards economically conservative leaders and more market-oriented means of breathing some fire into its aging economy, because it knows it’s only a matter of time before it can no longer support its aging and unproductive population. You can raise taxes, but even 100% of not much is not much.
> The paper is not intended to be a climate model. It is a critique
> of climate models. It argues why climate models are inherently
> unreliable means of long-term prediction, and they cannot be
> fixed even in principle.
Maybe it’s a critique, but its assumptions are not physically motivated, but arbitrary. There is a field called ‘error analysis’ in mathematics, which although it can not be directly applied to the complete climate models (since you have to make certain model assumptions), it is pretty applicable to the boundary conditions and the numerical errors when solving the differential equations. The point is: Even if the numerical errors and in the boundary conditions are taken into account, all modern models which are consistent with the past basically say the same thing: It’s getting warmer and humanity is largely responsible. If you say _all_ climate models are inapplicable, I’d like to have a reasonable, physically based, peer reviewed and generally accepted paper for each single model which shows either that the model assumptions of are wrong, or that the error analysis for the solution of the differential equations or boundary conditions is wrong. The arguments you’ve shown so far are more along the lines “I don’t want to believe”.
Also IMO, the thing you are confused about is thet while climate models don’t allow to predict the _exact_ behavior of chaotic systems, they still allow to make statements about _averaged_ quanties which are coherent with reality. I’m more a fluid mechanics guy, so let me give you an example about turbulence which is also a chaotic system for high Reynolds numbers: While models like LES and RANS don’t allow to predict the location of specific vortices, they still predict the averaged turbulence in quite good agreement with experiments. For many applications (e.g. calculating drag of ships, cars, airplanes) the average turbulence is enough, since it allows to calculate the expected energy loss quite well. The same is true for climate models when it comes to temperature (although there the only experiment we have so far is called ‘industrialization’).
> I’ll repeat, very briefly: Taxes distort prices, thereby leading
> to less efficient choices and/or raising the cost of what is
> being taxed, which makes these things (and in the case of energy
> everything else) more expensive, which means there’s less of it
> for everyone, which lowers the standard of living.
This is a quite antiquated view on what value is. In fact this view which was one the main reasons for the great depression in the 1930s. You can generate a lot of value implementing energy efficency measures: the guy you pay to build your new solar heater will buy a new car from you the next day. This is especially true if the guy would be otherwise unemployed. If you have energy taxes, the private sector will get back orders of the same magnitute from the government, since governments aren’t eager to stack money on bank accounts (if they are not corrupt anyway). The thing is that when it comes to the economy you can’t argue purely supply driven. (You can’t also argue exclusively demand driven but I’m far from doing that.) Just look at sacandinavian countries: they have state quotas in excess of 50% of the GDP, yet they are the wealthiest in the world, have very good infrastructure and very good social security systems.
You are right that taxes can be an important policy instrument. BUT: Why do you want to prevent people smoking, drinking alcohol or consuming drugs and why don’t you want them to make use of energy efficiently?
Also look around what is currently taxed: The VAT also covers food. Do you want to prevent people to eat? You’re view on taxes it thus way too narrowly-minded: The purpose of taxes is to benefit the society as a whole when individuals alone can’t handle a task. Would you like to build the roads you use daily yourself? railways? police and justice systems? social security? You can argue yes, but that would ultimately lead to something like what Somalia is today…
> As for your point about Europe, you’re confusing cause and
> effect. For the most part, Europe didn’t get rich by taxing
> people.
As far as Germany is concerned their economy was basically zero after worldwar II and always heavily taxed. They call this “social market economy”.
I didn’t say I wanted to stop people smoking. I don’t like the idea of using tax as a policy instrument at all. And I don’t like the idea of taxing food, no. (In fact, where I live, a lot of food is excluded from VAT for exactly that reason.) I don’t like any tax that disincentivises investment, that distorts markets, targets specific categories of people or activities, serves any purpose beyond generating sufficient revenue for government operations.
And I certainly don’t believe in using tax to target specific activities and distort specific markets when you’re not even sure if there’s a problem, and if there is, what exactly causes it, and if you do, whether the proposed solution will even help.
On the models, as I said before, I’m planning a more detailed piece for when I have the time that addresses specific reasons why I don’t believe computer models are a good enough basis for public policy. I’ll take your comments into consideration when I research that piece.
> (In fact, where I live, a lot of food is excluded from VAT for
> exactly that reason.)
I know. I’ve been living in SA for some time, too. But I really didn’t want to live exclusively on maize-meals and oats…
> I don’t like any tax that disincentivises investment, that
> distorts markets, targets specific categories of people or
> activities, serves any purpose beyond generating sufficient
> revenue for government operations.
Agreed. But not all governmental activities are more inefficient than private sector ones (especially when it comes to infrastructure, social security and education systems). I think the root of our fundamental dispute is on where to draw the line. Let’s say both approaches, high and low taxation are possible and both work well for some aspects and not so well for others. Which one you like better simply depends on your mentality. I for my part prefer social peace and a well working society to my own personal wealth at any cost, but of course you can disagree with me.
Fascinating string of comments to read, proving to me that, for some people — and it is not you Ivo — climate change, global warming and what goes with it, has become more of a religion and a cult than a science, in the process scooping up all the old socialists and communists that were proved so horribly wrong by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its command economy. Climate change and global warming are just another handy stick with which to beat the capitalists and give a new spin to the politics of envy.